SOA Consortium Insights

New SOA Consortium Podcast: Melvin Greer on SOA Hard Problems & Spiral Solution Development

The SOA Consortium was extremely fortunate to have Mel Greer, Lockheed Martin’s Chief SOA Architect, return to speak at our June meeting in Ottawa. Consistent with his March talk on SOA Competency Centers, Mel delivered a very engaging and thought-provoking talk on the topic of SOA Hard Problems and Spiral Solution Development.

Mel began by defining hard problems and spirals. Hard problems have three characteristics. First, a hard problem doesn’t go away over time. Second, left unresolved, a hard problem will have a significant negative impact on your SOA adoption. Third and most important, resolving a hard problem requires multiple disciplines that come from inside and outside your own organization. A spiral is a technique that breaks a hard problem into a series of small activities, each lasting 30-90 days. Each activity, or spiral, produces an answer that moves the hard problem towards resolution.

Lockheed Martin has identified SOA hard problems across six categories: business, engineering, operations, security, governance and skills development. During his talk, Mel shared examples of hard problems within each category, as well as the inter-relationships between hard problems.

Within the engineering category, Mel spoke of altering existing development processes and methodologies for SOA, designing for context awareness, and designing for runtime discovery and composition. In respect to runtime discovery and composition, Lockheed Martin is trying to determine the best way for a running to composition to become aware of newly delivered capability. As an example, Mel called out how the Mars Land Rover continues to receive new capability without returning to earth.

In closing, Mel spoke of impending challenges as third-party services – SaaS, Applications as a Service (APAS), cloud computing, etc – become the new business models. These changes will require support for service-level agreements, real-time monitoring, end-to-end testing, pricing models and service usability.  Mel encouraged attendees to consider these new hard problems in their work as a multi-discipline, cross-industry consortium.

To listen to, or download the audio recording of Mel’s presentation, and view the slides please go here.

Mel's talk is the third of several podcasts recorded at the June meeting.  Next up is K. Scott Morrison of Layer 7 Technologies on How to Fail at SOA.  Earlier, we released Jim Johnson's talk on SOA Trends & Pipelining and  David Butler's talk on SOA Transformation.

New SOA Consortium Podcast: David Butler on SOA Transformation

David Butler, Worldwide SOA Director and Chief Evangelist, HP, kicked off the SOA Consortium’s June meeting in Ottawa with an information-packed presentation on SOA Transformation.

Setting the record straight from the start, David shared “In many respects the SOA market has lost its vision around what SOA is actually trying to do. Not provide a new set of technology, but provide a transformation focused on a design point called a business service. A business service drives measureable business outcome.” David then shared examples of business outcomes from a semiconductor company, a financial services firm and an insurance provider.

David pointed out that successful SOA transformation is more than implementing software. Transformation spans people, organization, process and technology. On the organizational aspect, David called out the criticality of business-IT alignment for proper business service identification and implementation. “…how we map business capabilities in a consumer-provider fashion, and map that into IT systems and technologies. A business person should be able to consume and provide capabilities without knowledge of the underlying technology and platforms, and do that in a changeable manner.”

David shared a 10-point roadmap for SOA transformation, based on customer experience, that covered business service definition, center of excellence, SOA governance, execution architecture and platform, quality and provisioning, service lifecycle, data center operations, IT management processes and line of business engagement.

In closing, David stated, "SOA is a business-oriented architecture". Following his presentation, David engaged in Q&A with the meeting attendees on SOA transformation challenges, including security, business service definition and granularity, service-engineering, service chargeback and economic models, and the changing role of the CIO.

To listen to, or download the audio recording of David’s presentation and view the slides please go here. 

David's talk is the first of several podcasts recorded at the June meeting.  Next up is Jim Johnson of the Standish Group on Trends in SOA.

Ross Altman's Getting to the Service Oriented Enterprise Podcast Available

Ross Altman's talk on Getting to the Service Oriented Enterprise from our March meeting is now available as a podcast.  In this podcast, Ross speaks to the opportunities and challenges of composite application development, the role of open standards and open source in SOA, general SOA challenges, and Ross' view of SOA futures, including real-time SOA, mobile SOA, trusted SOA and more.

To listen to the podcast and grab the slides, go here.  Keep an eye out for additional podcasts from our March meeting.

SOA Consortium Practitioner Panel at Impact - Tuesday, April 8

If you are going to IBM's Impact next week, be sure to check out our real-world practitioner panel Tuesday morning at 10:30.  Moderated by Richard Soley, the panel features Burt Covnot, Bank of America, Senior Enterprise Architect, Melvin Greer, Lockheed Martin, Senior Research Engineer, Principal, and Aleks Buterman, Lincoln Financial Group, Chief Architect. 

Knowing all of the panelists, I'm sure the session will be filled with practical insights, interesting ideas and humor.  The session is ITE-2495, within the IT Executive/CIO Imperative track.

In a separate session, Melvin is speaking on Building skills to create a world-class business architecture (BIT-1548).  Mel spoke at our March SOA Consortium meeting in DC and was fantastic.  [Podcast forthcoming]

We hope to see you at these sessions, in the halls, at the SOA Jam, and/or on the expo floor.

SOA 2008 - It's the economy...

This morning’s dismal US Jobs Report and the ensuing analysis  laden with the “R-word” reminded me of a conversation our community-of-practice had on our December 4, 2007 call that I’ve been mean meaning to post on. During that call, prompted by an earlier discussion with Surekha Durvasula, I asked our members the following:

“What does the ensuing (or on-going) economic downturn mean for SOA in 2008? Will the economic downturn and associated budget cutbacks drive organizations to, or away from, SOA in 2008?”

In general, the group on the call spoke of the need for a SOA approach to respond to changing economic (and political) conditions. However, they do foresee changes in implementation investment philosophies, particularly at the resource (application and infrastructure) layers. In respect to garnering investment in tight times, organizations need to approach SOA as a joint business-IT strategy, directly linked to business initiatives.

What follows are excerpts from our call. For member confidentiality, names and organizations are not included. 

Industry practice leader - “It depends on how critical the business direction is that would be inhibited by not doing SOA. In other words, if in order to succeed in the downturn there is a business direction a company has to take that they can’t accomplish right now because of way it is functioning, like it or not, expense or not, they are going to move forward… they might be more selective in how they manage the waves of work they need to do.

I expect to see SOA going forward. Because it is based on – or should be based on -- business value, rather than just technology direction.”

Chief Architect 1 –“In the government sector, a new administration is coming on board. So, a lot of change is coming on many levels. This will create increased spending in IT and SOA specifically.

In the commercial sector, the economic situation might be a downturn mostly from a consumer perspective. Businesses will be looking at emerging and overseas markets to diversify and respond to the dollar bottoming out – manufacturing and portfolio investments. That type of business change is ripe for the development of a SOA approach.

I think we will continue to see SOA. Instead of just composite application development, we’ll see more choreography as it relates to peer-to-peer business interactions. Organizations will open up infrastructure to allow business peers to develop and consume SOA based business services.”

Technology Director – “The financial industry is definitely cutting back. But, other industries, such as telecommunications with the spectrum auctions and Verizon opening its network will continue to invest. As well, enterprises are beginning a rush to Web 2.0 and social networks, similar to the ecommerce rush. With the growth of Web 2.0/Social Networks (Google, Facebook, Yahoo!), enterprises, especially in consumer markets, will need to catch up. Both of these will result in the implementation of SOA. SOA is the backend.”

Industry practice leader – “While SOA will continue to grow, we might see cutbacks related to transformation beneath the services  because that is expensive to do. It’s a bit dangerous. But, I suspect companies might try to limp along – putting services on top of old applications. Depends on how dramatic the requirement is to transform. Such as, is the platform going to die? On the surface there will be services, cutbacks might be lower level.”

Chief Architect 2– “If you are a company faced with global competition or cost-cutting measures, you’ll still be service-enabling. But, I can see a move towards the prior point -- that underlying resource investments (applications and infrastructure) may be put off. Although, that wouldn’t be my preference.”

Business Strategist – “From a business standpoint, I think the downturn and budget constraints may help the SOA cause. I believe that people will look harder at the benefits. From that perspective, people will start to believe in SOA more from a point of necessity.”

Industry practice leader – “In other words from a downturn people will have to be more creative, and will turn towards SOA”

Join our discussion. What is your view on economic conditions and SOA? Please leave a comment, or post with a trackback. Thanks!

SOA: Many things

Burc Oral has a good post on the 'SOA Beast' on the Strategic Use of Information Technology blog.  Using the backdrop of the blind men and an elephant, Burc discusses the different perspectives of SOA and services, provides insights on SOA and service lifecycles, reminds us "that SOA is more than a buzzword. It is the way for organizations to rapidly develop capabilities, to collaborate and meet the expectations of their stakeholders. SOA’s agility makes it an enterprise business strategy" and cautions us "SOA may also be DOA, dead on arrival, if we narrowly assume that it is just a bunch of web services, a product or a panacea for integration nightmares."

Read his full post here. 

December SOA Consortium Meeting in Burlingame, CA

Although I was scooped by our marketing folks, I want to brag about share, our great line-up for the Dec 12-13 meeting in Burlingame. We design our quarterly meetings for members and non-members to interact around the topic of business-driven SOA.

Our confirmed invited speakers are Sandy Carter, Judith Hurwitz and Amit Sinha.  Our Hot Topic Roundtable is on CIO SOA Concerns and features Sandy, Judith and our own Richard Soley.  Details from our press announcement:   

On Day One of the meeting, Sandy Carter, VP, SOA & WebSphere Strategy, Channels and Marketing, IBM, will give the presentation “IT needs SOA Skills,” while Judith Hurwitz, President, Hurwitz & Associates, will present “Planning for SOA 2008 by learning from SOA 2007.” Both featured speakers will join SOA Consortium Executive Director Dr. Richard Soley for a SOA Hot Topic Roundtable discussion on CIO SOA Concerns. Meeting attendees will have the opportunity to participate with comments and questions. The Roundtable will be recorded and made available after the meeting as an on-demand podcast. On Day Two of the meeting, featured speaker Amit Sinha, VP of Portfolio Marketing, SAP will present “The Business Case for Service Oriented Architecture - Business Network Transformation.”

For more information, check out the full agenda.  Registration is open to the public.  This is a great opportunity to interact with leading SOA thought leaders and practitioners in a sales-free environment.

Collective SOA Wisdom: A Consortium Experience - member guest post from Dr. Burc Oral

SOA-C member Burc Oral of Cell Exchange reports on the Fourth Service Oriented Architecture for E-Government Conference:

The Fourth Service Oriented Architecture for E-Government Conference was held on October 1-2, 2007 at MITRE. The meeting focused on information sharing environments for enterprise architecture, semantic interoperability, Service-Oriented Architecture, data and information architecture, and service systems.

The Service Oriented Architecture for E-Government Conference was started as an outlet for the SOA CoP (Community of Practice) to align many Industry Advisory Council (IAC) initiatives around Service Oriented Architecture. The IAC brings industry and government executives together to exchange information, support professional development, improve communications and understanding, solve issues and build partnership and trust, thereby enhancing the government's ability to serve the nation's citizenry. The SOA CoP provides the AIC sub-committees and the federal government with expertise and coordination in SOA Reference Models, Specifications and Standards, SOA Governance and SOA Implementation and Testing.

This recent meeting was well attended by industry and government participants because of the successful promotion and exposure of the event by the planning committee, which had started in June. The event was packed with key note speakers, panels, demos, tutorials, and poster sessions.

I talked about the collective SOA wisdom and endorsed the SOA Consortium experience as an advocacy organization. You can find more about this presentation on the SOA eGov site. I shared our mission to promote and enable business agility via Service-Oriented Architecture for the Global 1000, major government agencies and mid-market businesses. I also briefed the community on our activities:

• Building awareness amongst the C-level executives on the cost, value, challenges and success factors of moving to SOA
• Establishing awareness and linkages between business operations and IT professionals on approaches for using SOA to enable business process improvement initiatives
• Enabling architects and senior development managers to sell, transition to, develop, and support a SOA in practice.

At the third meeting in early May 2007, the SOA Consortium was composed of two dozen companies. It was a great pleasure to report on the growth in membership to over 60.

There was great interest on our collective work which has been underway on three fronts: Promoting Business-Driven SOA, Generating Business Value from SOA, and Executing Business-Driven SOA.

SOA Practitioner'€™s Forum: Service Version Management or Mayhem?

In our Community of Practice's Open Forum, Brenda Michelson shared some comments from CIOs and CTOs on managing SOA environments:

During our February Executive Summits, the CIOs and CTOs expressed concern that there aren't ITIL-like practices and guidelines for managing a SOA based environment.

A specific question was "How many versions of a service should be in production at once?"€ The group stated that "It was naive to believe only one version of a service would be live". But, how many is too many?

Brenda then asked our COP:

What are SOA-C members doing in their organizations? How many versions are active? How many versions are manageable? What are your version limits and practices?

I agree that service versioning is inevitable and must be managed. In this post I'€™d like to share my response to Brenda'€™s question. I focused on "€œwhen and why" to version. At the end, I have some questions for the broader SOA community.

Before I continue, I should introduce myself. I am Surekha Durvasula, Enterprise Architecture Manager for Kohl'€™s and the Leader of the SOA-C'€™s Executing Business-Driven SOA Strategy.

My Service Versioning Perspective

In the broadest sense, there may be two key reasons to support business service versioning.

A) Consumer SLA/ QoS driven

B) Business functionality or business policy driven

Consumer SLA driven service versioning could be supported by just altering the values on the envelope. The envelope level metadata can be used to direct a call from the mediation layer (read ESB) to the appropriate service provider end point. Here the consumer can provide the values for the SLA metadata or a metadata lookup activity for the service consumer can be performed by the mediation layer.

Examples of the Consumer SLAs could be greater audit, more stringent response times, tighter security needs etc. Here the service interface layer may not have to be altered and so the consumer may not be affected. However, the service provider implementation layer may have to support multiple service implementation end points that are in keeping with the QoS requirements.

Business Functionality driven service versions are typically impacted by service interface and/ or the payload level changes.

Here the consumer has to "know" how to construct the new payload and may need to "indicate" to the mediation layer the right business service to invoke. Given this behavior change on the consumer side, service versioning becomes a necessity to insulate existing consumers. One way of limiting the number of service versions being supported may be to leverage the service mediation layer to populate default values on newer payload parameters or to perform payload transformation. The mediation layer can invoke utilities/interceptors on behalf of the service consumer to absorb the impact of changes to the interface or the payload. However, in scenarios where no valid default values are available or else if new consumer context information is required on the payload then a new version of the service would need to be published, thus requiring the enterprise to have to support multiple service versions.

Other considerations for supporting service versioning include management and monitoring costs, efficient use of IT resources, regulatory and central governance policies and the stringency of the contract agreements with the consumers.

Service Versioning Discussion Questions

1. How many versions of a service should be "live" at any given time? How many versions are too many?

2. Do you use the service mediation layer to achieve backward compatibility?

3. Where do you determine the service version - the mediation layer, the service consumer or a service provider?

4. Do you have governance models and policies around transitioning existing consumers to new versions? Who is responsible for executing that transition?

5. What is the most graceful way of "retiring" or "decommissioning" a service?

Please share your comments on this post, your own blog with a trackback, or via email to blog at soa-consortium dot org

Ashok Kumar of Avis Budget and the SOA-C answers "SOA's 6 Burning Questions"

Ashok Kumar, Architect and IT Director at Avis Budget Group and SOA Consortium Co-Chair, answers SOA's 6 Burning Questions in a recent JavaWorld article.  In the article, Ashok shares his perspective on SOA skills, solution performance, security, and generating business value: 

"1. Is anyone saving (or making money) using SOA?

Ashok Kumar of Avis Budget Group says he is. Avis began using SOA about two years ago in portions of the company to open new channels with travel partners. “They can now do direct business with us without having to go through a middleman. So it’s saved them a couple bucks, saved us a couple of bucks,” says Kumar, who is based in New Jersey and is director of services architecture information technology. “The cost of bringing on new partners is down to nothing now because of SOA.”

Avis Budget can now bring on a new partner in a day instead of a month, he says, because with SOA it is just a matter of configuring a service rather than making large application changes. “When we started that the cost of bringing on a new partner was anywhere from $40,000 to $50,000, now it’s down to $3,000 or $4,000,” he says."

According to the article, Avis Budget's success is in the "real money" category:

"There are two kinds of payback with SOA, says Mike West of Saugatuck Technology. The first comes when IT can reduce the amount of money it spends providing services. West believes SOA adoption is still in its early stages, and that perhaps only 10% to 15% of businesses are using SOA and doing it in such a way to save money.

An even smaller percentage of companies are using SOA in such a way that they are improving earnings, he says.

The world is full of projects that can be done quickly and cheaply and offer no long-term benefit, West notes. SOA is a radically different approach to building and managing systems that create a foundation for rapid change, he says.

“The real money gets saved or gets made when you have this flexible business foundation so your business can be more profitable on a top-line basis – not just IT savings being subtracted so the top line is smaller,” West says."

Emphasis is mine.  Check out the full article.