BPM / SOA Community Insights

BPM / SOA Case Study Contest: Deadline Extended to July 30, 2010

The news: By popular demand, we’ve extended the deadline on the Business Agility and Process Optimization enabled by Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Case Study Competition.  Entries are due July 30, 2010.  Start your submission here. 

The refresher: the contest is open to organizations of all sizes, including government agencies, which have successfully delivered business or mission value using a BPM, SOA or combined BPM-SOA approach.

Similar to the SOA Consortium’s contests in 2008 -  2009, the goal of the BPM/SOA Case Study Competition is to highlight business success stories and lessons learned to provide proof points and insights for other organizations considering or pursuing BPM, SOA or combined BPM-SOA adoption. To qualify for the competition, the project must be complete with demonstrated business results.

Entries will be judged on the complexity of the business problem addressed, the ROI/Business Value achieved (Agility/Innovation/Flexibility/Optimization/Resilience/Service Delivery), the level and sophistication of the cross-organizational collaboration (Business/Technical) and the usage of BPM/SOA approaches and supporting technology. In addition to one overall winner, organizations will be recognized by industry/government.

Case Study Competition winners will be announced at the BPM/SOA CoP meeting in Cambridge MA on September 21, 2010 and will be featured on the BPM/SOA CoP website and in October publications by BPTrends, SearchSOA and SearchCIO.

Visit the contest homepage to learn about the guidelines, start the application, and meet the judges.  Submissions will be accepted through July 30, 2010.

Going to IBM Innovate? Smarter Business Planning and Analysis: Business Architecture as a Foundation

If you are going to IBM Innovate, the Rational Software Conference, plan to attend our session on Wednesday afternoon.  I’m co-presenting with IBM’s Robert Shields on Business Architecture as a Foundation to Business Planning, Analysis and Change. 

My part of the presentation, is based on themes and outcomes from the SOA Consortium’s EA2010 group.  As always, expect a fair amount of business talk and definite traceability to business motivations. 

The details:

Session: EAM-2259: Smarter Business Planning and Analysis: Business Architecture as a Foundation
Date/Time: Wed, 9/Jun, 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Room: Dolphin - Oceanic 7
Co-presenter(s): Robert Shields, IBM, Senior Market Manager, Enterprise Architecture, Brenda M. Michelson, Elemental Links

Hope to see you next week! 

March Symposium in Jacksonville: BPM, SOA & Carving a path to Business-IT Integration

The Business Ecology Initiative and BPM / SOA Consortium are co-hosting a two-day symposium, March 23-24, 2010, in Jacksonville FL.  The Symposium will feature invited speaker talks and group discussion on Business Ecology, BPM and SOA drivers, successes and enablers.  The program will focus on the connection between business and technology, with a particular emphasis on practices to carve a path to business-IT integration. 

Invited speakers include:

Faisal Hoque, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, BTM Corporation, on The Power of Convergence: Why Bringing Business and Technology Together Matters

Unifying the management of business and technology will sooner or later involve everyone in an organization, from the chairman of the board to the newest hire on a project team. Convergence requires not only new roles and responsibilities but also a new mindset and new skills. In converged companies, business-unit and technology leaders operate almost interchangeably: every manager is accountable for some business-related aspect of technology. One sign of a converged company is that the people making decisions have mastered the skills needed to articulate their business objectives and use the appropriate technology required to achieve those objectives.

Faisal will illustrate the hallmarks of a converged organization according to the Business Technology Management Framework and define a set of organizational competencies that enable an enterprise to manage business and technology together, as well as outline how maturity in these capabilities is achieved through the implementation of well-defined processes, appropriate organizational structures, timely information and appropriate technology automation.

Dr. Don Belles, Boeing on IT: Transformative or Transformer?

In this session Dr. Belles will offer his insights on why previous approaches to business and IT integration have failed to provide a complete systemic picture of what happens to the business environment from changes in the field of IT.  Building on the work of the Alvin and Heidi Toffler, it becomes apparent the relationship between Business and IT will remain tumultuous at best.  But each of these IT perceptual changes has only reinforced the existing structure and maintained a business dependent paradigm.  Technology ceased as a tool, partner, or an enabler, it is a transformer, not merely transformative.  The business environment is transformed by the way technology interacts with existing environmental transformers such as politics, societal wisdom, global financial activity, legal decisions, etc.  Currently we are on the cusp of a dramatic change in thinking.  This evolving business environment demands rethinking; not only how to apply the new technology, but also how to integrate the near-term-emerging and soon-due-technologies with the social constructs appearing within the new, transitional, and old consumer bases.  Distinctions between technology use and social application are disappearing.  Web2.0 is merely the leading edge of the transformation. 

William Ulrich, President, Tactical Strategy Group, Inc. on A Proven Collaborative Governance Model for Business and IT

Business and IT have increasingly grown apart over the past decades and this has resulted in a misalignment of strategic and tactical goals and a communication breakdown between these two distinct, yet highly intertwined worlds. Business and IT largely communicate through a complex web of intermediaries that includes business analysts, IT analysts, IT architects, designers and a labyrinth of management tiers. Collaboration has been replaced by more and more costly efforts to create new techniques, technologies, communication languages and a variety of panaceas.

This session will provide a collaborative governance model to address the business / IT alignment and communication gap. We will also review a case study from a telecommunications company where the business / IT communication gap was closed and collaborative governance became a solution in practice – not just in name.

Alexander Samarin, Author of Improving Enterprise Business Process Management Systems, on Achieving synergy between BPM, SOA and EA

In this talk Alexander will share his experience with an architectural framework, which combines several modern methodologies and technologies [Enterprise Architecture (EA), Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)] for the improvement of enterprise business performance.  He will present the description of the architectural framework and examples of business cases.

Joe Raynus, Principal Consultant, ShareDynamics, Inc., on Business Ecology: Leveraging the Innovation Curve to Achieve Balance and Alignment in the Ever-changing Environment

To stay competitive, organizations have to have a high level of agility to adapt rapidly and cost efficiently to complex environment challenges such as customer demands, competition, markets, compliance requirements and economic conditions, to name a few. Is there a "method to the madness"? Can we ever achieve the level of flexibility, balance and technology alignment to effectively support the enterprise? This presentation will examine the concepts of Business Ecology, Innovation Curve and Measurement Framework that will help better understand, monitor and measure critical processes, analyze challenges and proactively take action.

In addition to the invited speaker sessions, Gail Raynus of ShareDynamics will lead a roundtable discussion on technology and business architecture, Brenda Michelson of Elemental Links, will lead a roundtable discussion on raising IT professionals’ business IQ, and representatives of the EA2010 group will discuss their recent Business Architecture Paper and the community response.

The Symposium is open to the public.  Review the agenda.  Register for the event.

BPM and SOA: Connected for Business Optimization

In October, the SOA Consortium announced the successful completion of its mission as well as plans to merge with the BPM Consortium.  Since January, the organizations have been working together to formalize the merged consortium’s mission, goals and objectives, identify some early projects, plan the March Symposium, and combine web properties. 

In this post, I want to share the newly combined BPM / SOA Consortium’s mission, goals and objectives.  But first, the context. 

Who is the BPM / SOA Consortium? 

The BPM / SOA Consortium is an advocacy group comprised of practitioners, service providers and technology vendors dedicated to promoting the business value, and enabling the successful adoption, of Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) by the Global 1000, major government agencies and midmarket businesses.

The BPM / SOA Consortium is a practice area community under the Business Ecology^TM Initiative (BEI).  BEI provides education, advocacy and member programs to enable organizations to achieve Business Ecology success, employ Actionable Architecture^TM, and carve a path to business-IT integration.

Business Ecology is a business-technology imperative focused on streamlining business processes, removing waste from technology portfolios, and adjusting resource consumption, to optimize business operations and foster business innovation.

The BPM / SOA Consortium is a newly expanded community, connecting the members and sponsors of the SOA and BPM Consortiums, to focus on business optimization.

Why did the BPM & SOA Consortiums merge?

The 2010 merger of the SOA and BPM Consortiums is based on the following premises:

• When the SOA Consortium began, Service Oriented Architecture was more of a fringe methodology that only a few organizations were doing with any great success, rather than an accepted part of an overall business strategy. Three years later, corporations large and small use the principles of SOA to enhance their overall business and technology strategies.
• A well-implemented Service Oriented Architecture leads to streamlined technology portfolios, improved resource sharing, better defined business capabilities, and ease of capability introduction or change.
• A well-implemented Business Process Management initiative leads to greater business agility, faster productivity and improved customer interactions for all stakeholders.
• The combined use of Service Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management results in an optimized business environment that is change-friendly, and poised for business innovation.
• Business and information technology professionals must collaborate to realize the highest yielding benefits of Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture.
• Enterprise and government practitioners would benefit greatly from a vibrant practitioner community to exchange insights on use cases, challenges and techniques, related to Service Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management, used individually, or combined.
• Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture, individually and combined, enable Business Ecology.

And now, the go forward organization.

BPM / SOA Consortium Mission

Promote the value and adoption of Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture as a means for organizations to optimize business operations, increase agility and streamline portfolios.

BPM / SOA Consortium Goals

The BPM / SOA Consortium is working to achieve the following goals by 2013, that:

• 75% of the Global 1000 and 50% of mid-sized businesses combine Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture to optimize business operations, streamline portfolios, and create a change-friendly business-technology environment.
• 75% of Major Government Agencies combine Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture to optimize mission operations, streamline portfolios, and create a change-friendly business-technology environment.

BPM / SOA Consortium Objectives:

• Shift the conversation from competing strategies to combined business value (business optimization)
• Provide education on business analysis, process design, governance, performance measurement and implementation techniques to combine Service Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management for business optimization
• Showcase Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture success stories, benefit realization, best practices and lessons learned
• Raise the Business IQ of information technology professionals and Tech-Savvy of business professionals to realize the greatest business value from Business Process Management, Service Oriented Architecture and business-technology
• Create a vibrant practitioner community for the exchange of insights on use cases, challenges and techniques, which will assist in value attainment, and spur broader, industry-wide Service Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management adoption.

Visit our website to learn about BPM / SOA Consortium membership and sponsorship.  Check out the agenda for our upcoming public symposium in Jacksonville Florida.

2009 Year in Review with Richard Soley: SOA, BPM, Cloud Computing and more

SearchSOA’s Rob Barry interviewed Richard Soley, CEO of the OMG, and Executive Director of the BPM / SOA Consortium, on hot topics at the close of 2009, including SOA, BPM, Cloud Computing and the future of information technology.  See what Richard has to say on 2009 and beyond in this 8:00 minute video interview.

Community Insights: Services, Sprawl, Marketplaces, Bazaars and Portfolio Management

Note: For practitioners, one of the most valuable aspects of consortium participation is the opportunity to exchange ideas in a trusted peer community.  While the diverse group doesn’t always reach a single conclusion, each participant gains new perspective to consider in their unique situations. 

One such SOA Consortium conversation thread started with service value, covered service marketplaces, cathedrals and bazaars, and concluded with service portfolio management.  What follows are notes from that conversation, published not as an answer, but for consideration as you expand the breadth and depth of your service-oriented architecture.  As always, we welcome comments.

CALL #1 – Service Sprawl and Service Marketplaces

In a series of calls, the SOA Consortium’s community of practice engaged in a very interesting discussion on service portfolio management.  The conversation began innocently enough, when one member queried the group on visual methods to demonstrate the value of a services approach to business personnel. 

This member was looking for insights on creating a business intelligence dashboard for business stakeholders to see the value of service adoption, including key metrics on service use and re-use, and time-to-market improvements.  His motivation wasn’t marketing, but an underlying concern that full SOA value wasn’t attained because of service sprawl.

In this case, the service sprawl had two sources.  First, and the more common cause, SOA was simultaneously adopted in different business lines.  In the early stages, each business line created its own services, unaware of reuse or collaboration opportunities.  Second, the organization acquired another organization with similar business lines, which was also pursuing SOA. 

Through conversation, members noted other service sprawl causes, such as lack of trust, immature service governance practices, and no mandates for service rationalization.

From here, the group began discussing ways to reduce and prevent service sprawl.  A popular idea was the creation of a services marketplace.  In a short brainstorming session, the group discussed incorporating prediction markets to gauge service popularity, and social technologies to build trust, as well as to strengthen the service offering with better definition, feature/function, and performance.  Detailed brainstorming notes follow.

Services Market Place Requirements

• Organizations need to “advertise” their services, advertise as in “marketing”, not UDDI type directory listing
• Developers need to learn about “popular services”.  These trusted services will continue to receive investment.  Less popular, duplicate services should be slated for obsolescence.
• Service consumers need ability to provide feedback on service, and suggest improvements
• People need ability to “vote with feet” or code
• Service sprawl is a people problem, therefore a social solution is required

Services Marketplace Functionality/Technology Ideas

• Create a prediction market to understand service popularity (existing or planned service).  Each marketplace participant creates an investment portfolio of 10 services.  To add a service to your portfolio, one must be removed.  The service mix across portfolios will indicate service popularity, as well as pruning trends.  Spigit was cited as a technology example, it is used by Microsoft (and others) for release date prediction
• Use Amazon model for customer review and even for service recommendations “consumers of this service also use this/these service(s)”
• eBay seller rating, equates to service publisher rating, “also available from this publisher…”
• Service definition might benefit from Facebook (Lombardi) extended water cooler model, experts/interested parties can add to definition/requirements in public wiki like environment

Services Marketplace Questions

• Is there a unit of exchange?  If so, what is it?
• What is the best way to bring the marketplace into the work stream of potential service consumers, providers?  Is it via calendaring – associated with design and review meetings?  Modeling tools?  IDE?
• Is there a similar marketplace opportunity for a business process models?

About this point, the group made the leap to the Cathedral & Bazaar metaphor.  Service repository as we know it today is Cathedral, Services marketplace is Bazaar.

Service Bazaar Startup Needs

• Advertise the Bazaar
• Place close to work stream
• Establish minimum entry requirements: Merchants must provide certain attributes for each service: purpose, business process, business process model, nonfunctional attributes, implementation attributes (can and can’t do), chargeback and rates, classes of service (levels, cost), support model (use at own risk or supported)
• Find and win early adopters
• Incorporate knowledge management, social technology and community practices
• Word of mouth marketing – early adopters are best advocates
• Incremental introduction plan

At the close of the call, the member originally posing the service sprawl problem decided to explore prediction market technology for service portfolio rationalization.  As well, the group decided to continue the bazaar discussion on the next call.

CALL #2 – Service Cathedrals and Bazaars

Continuing the services marketplace conversation theme, but with many new call participants, there was a strong sense that service sprawl needs to be managed both proactively, via portfolio definition/management practices and reactively, via both top-down rationalization efforts and bottoms-up service marketplace advertising and consumption patterns.

Call participants from enterprises expressed concerned that a pure services marketplace – introducing competing code – is not behavior a development organization can afford to participate in.

There was strong support for the advertising aspect of the services marketplace, letting people know a service existed, its purpose, current usage scenarios, community ratings etc. 

For a services marketplace to be successful, it needs to be close to where developers work.  Oracle’s Enterprise repository (BEA Flashline) was cited as an example of tool with community engagement vision.

It was noted that in organizations where sprawl exists, or M&A activity is underway, the services marketplace can provide a mechanism to contain further sprawl and promote (Darwinian) rationalization, even before formal rationalization assignments/efforts are underway. 

Another note was that duplication does not always equate to waste.  An organization’s operating model (see Ross & Weil) may call for some separation of services to support a fast growing/changing business unit/activity.

There was a call for distinction in the marketplace’s unit of exchange (used in funding decisions) from service portfolio metrics.  Service portfolio metrics should not be number of services; instead use percentage of (unplanned) redundancy & coverage gaps. 

The group believes portfolio management – value of IT investment over time – is an important concept.  The current project focus in most organizations – on-time and on-budget measurement – is very short sighted.  Businesses do look at total IT spend over time, and percent of development versus maintenance, but most often don’t drill into the specific business domains or business capability.  This lack of transparency can lead to a behavior of delivering sub-par solutions that require frequent replacement. 

In respect to proactive service rationalization, the group spoke of defining enterprise and/or domain service maps. They also spoke of the need to get business analysts involved in service definition, and that business analysts might be better accepted by business units if they (business analysts) reported to Finance or Quality, rather than IT.

Additionally, the group discussed incentives for sharing services.  The biggest point/concern here is that the incentives need to map to portfolio metrics and goals.  Avoid the trap of putting incentives in place that encourage “gaming the system” to receive the incentive while damaging the overall service portfolio.  Some members believe the incentive is keeping your job.

A late discussion point was that sustainable SOA has organizational implications beyond initial centers of excellence.  Sustainable SOA requires pervasive practice, cascading changes (service thinking and management) to funding practices, project management, solution delivery, operations, and change management.  In other words, SOA cannot be a side practice forever.

CALL #3 – Service Portfolio Management

Reviewing the key discussion points over the past two calls, the group concludes that both models – Services Cathedral and Services Bazaar – are valid.

The adoption of a cathedral and/or bazaar approach may vary based on project lifecycle phase, business criticality of the problem being solved, experience of the project/development team in respect to SOA, and/or time to market considerations.

A discussion on project lifecycle practices leads to a discussion on portfolio management practices:

• Organizations most often view portfolio management in respect to managing concurrent projects and managing IT investment. 
• Organizations also practice asset management in respect to purchased (infrastructure oriented) software and hardware.  Vendor contracts, releases, technology advances and the like drive these asset management practices.
• Organizations seldom practice asset management practices on their application portfolios, and if they do, it is for purchased rather than custom-built software. 

A service-oriented approach fundamentally changes the basic management unit from an application, to services, or a bundle of services that represent a business function (component, segment, flow or capability), which are consumed by many applications, business processes and/or domains.

The multi-purpose aspect of services, and bill-of-materials structure of service compositions and solution assemblies, point more towards product management practices than traditional application management practices.  The shift to product, rather than project or application thinking, forces changes to funding, project management, asset management and operations practices. 

Most notably, organizations will need to be deliberate in the realm of service portfolio management, understanding what business capabilities are offered in the portfolio (marketplace), how those capabilities are instantiated via software and information assets (model to asset mapping), and how/where those capabilities are packaged into end-products (applications, processes) that solve a business need.

The diagram below, previously published, illustrates services and the various process and portfolio interaction points across the service lifecycle.

[Click on diagram to enlarge]

SOA Consortium EA2010 Working Group’s Business Architecture Paper Now Available

The SOA Consortium’s EA2010 Working Group – a group of “street-smart” enterprise architecture practitioners – has been actively discussing the domains, services, practices and skills required for a thriving, business relevant enterprise architecture practice in the 2010s. 

A critical finding of these discussions is the emphasis of technology concerns at the expense of business understanding, and ultimately, true business enablement, in most enterprise architecture practices today. Successful enterprise architecture practices in the 2010s must give equal emphasis to technology and business concerns. The means for this re-balancing is the elevation, and in some cases initial adoption, of business architecture practices.

Typically, the business architecture practices and artifacts in enterprise architecture frameworks focus on business processes and business uses cases. This is not surprising, since these artifacts and practices are a prerequisite to IT-based business solution delivery. However, this is not sufficient.

To reap the benefits of business architecture – business visibility and agility – the business architecture must reflect the entire business design, from the point of view of business designers and owners, rather than IT solution delivery. This point of view begins with business motivations, includes key business execution elements – such as operating model, capabilities, value chains, processes, and organizational models – and transcends information technology representations, such as business services, rules, events and information models.

While we strongly believe that business architecture is a business domain, the Chief Information Officer (CIO), given his/her unique position to view business plans, business processes, information flows, and technology portfolios across the organization, most often champions business architecture formalization. 

In this discussion-oriented paper, the EA2010 group shares their findings on the following questions:

•    What comprises business architecture? 
•    What is the purpose? 
•    Who participates? 
•    How do you make business architecture accessible? 
•    How does business architecture facilitate business decision-making and change? 
•    How do you keep business architecture current?
•    How does business architecture relate to BPM, SOA and IT solution delivery?

To read the paper please go here.

If you have comments on the paper and/or insights on the discussion questions, please leave a comment here or email us.

@ Gartner AADI: SOA Success Stories: Delivering Business Value and a Go-Forward Foundation in a Tough Economic Climate

The SOA Consortium hosted two end-user panels at Gartner’s Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit this week.  Notes taken during our SOA Success Stories panel follow.  Read about our Cloud Computing in the Real World panel here.

Session Abstract: Tough economic climates call for tough decisions. Instead of jeopardizing the future by cutting out all initiatives mentioning architecture, the organizations represented on this panel continue to invest in their business-driven SOA initiatives, resulting in near-term business value and creating a viable foundation for continued business optimization and growth initiatives. In this session, SOA Consortium and CIO magazine case study contest winners, along with leading members of the SOA Consortium, will share insight from their SOA success stories, including the business challenge addressed, achieved ROI, business participation, lessons learned and how they have, or plan to, incorporate complementary techniques such as BPM, event processing, business analytics and cloud computing.

Panelists: Tom Keen, CTO of BlueStar Energy, Leo Shuster, Director of Application Development at Safeguard Properties, John Woolbright, CIO for Omega Financial and Scott Metzger, CTO TransUnion Interactive

Moderators: Richard Soley, OMG/SOA Consortium and Daniel Sholler

Introductory Statements

Leo Shuster: Prior to Safeguard, was running SOA program at National City Bank.  National City has since been absorbed PNC.  National City was industry recognized leader in SOA, post-merger, PNC shut-down the SOA program.  However, everything that was delivered from the SOA program is running in production, adding value to the business.

Tom Keen: BlueStar Energy was a SOA Consortium 2009 Case Study Contest Winner, see the write-up of their winning case.  Took an engineering approach to this project.  Iterative plan for value delivery.  Technology stack is open source, about 98%.  Spent a lot of time on resiliency.  View the technology stack as temporal.  Some has been replaced out already, replacement also open source. 

Business success: explosion of product, entered new territories, new demographic market, all done in initial timeframe estimate.  Have had very little IT attrition with this approach.  Currently on 4th generation of NextStar.

Scott Metzger: Startup developing capabilities that needed to be delivered across multiple channels, in multiple regions.  Some capabilities were developed internally, others were third party sourced.  Startup was acquired by TransUnion Interactive.  The business, technical and change requirements were best met with SOA.  Now, some of the services are being offered to customers via the cloud, by creating APIs into the services.

John Woolbright: Previously, John was with Synovus Financial.  Synovus was the grand winner in the 2008 SOA Consortium Case Study contest, see the write-up.  John shares that Synovus is well positioned with SOA platform to emerge from economic downturn.

Q&A

Q: For Leo, why didn’t the new management embrace SOA? 

A: Cultural issue with acquiring bank.  PNC is siloed.  As acquirer, there was a bit of not-invented-here (NIH).

Q: For Scott, was your technology approach a reason for the acquisition?

A: Yes.  The agility the infrastructure offered allowed the acquiring organization to meet agility and growth goals.  Scott’s team, framework and approach became the “tail that wagged the dog”, driving SOA adoption within the acquiring company.

Q: Types of services, exposing services externally?

Leo: Majority of services were internal.  The services weren’t directly tied to revenue streams, like Synovus’ and TransUnion’s services are.

Q: BlueStar had enterprise architecture initiative at center of SOA, was that true for other panelists?

John: Started with centralized strategy, enterprise (shared) ESB.  Learned that a federated approach, with well-defined domains of control, and well-defined standards, was a better approach.  So, EA approach, but not centralized strategy.  EA provided investment protection, such as establishing contracts with key vendors.  Having well defined service standards saved them money in contracting the development of services.

Q: SOA as management approach versus technology approach?

Tom: A major building block in their success was business engagement.  The business has accepted responsibility for the delivery of NextStar.  The business speaks to IT in terms of business services, architecture and refactoring, when discussing new business opportunities and the work required to attain the new business capability (new product, new market).  Tom has so much support that asking for a 23% budget increase resulted in a 68% budget increase.  The business believes in the value of the architecture and program and understands that continued investment enables continued revenue growth.

Q: Role of master data management, BPM, etc in SOA success?

Leo: Successful SOA depends on services.  BPM became ancillary because the services layer was in place.  Services were created to expose master data.

John: Applied process thinking to the project.  How do you break out a project into a process approach.  How do you orchestrate the work across domains.

Tom: Leverage business rules, semantics from BPM in SOA.

An audience question on technology problems.  The theme of answers was the complexity of the distributed computing environment.  In one example, an unknown firewall blocked a service request for weeks.  In another, there was a code check-in miss on a bug fix.  Subsequent version of code reintroduced bug.  The key is to have visibility into your environment.  Integrate your service development processes into existing code and change management practices.

Another question called out the need for a proactive approach to SOA security.  Plan a security framework, don’t append security as an after thought. 

Another called out need to isolate impact of version or provider changes.  Implement a proxy layer to allow for seamless upgrades and backwards compatibility.

@ Gartner AADI: End-User Panel: Cloud Computing in the Real World

The SOA Consortium hosted two end-user panels at Gartner’s Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit this week.  Notes taken during our Cloud Computing in the Real World panel follow.

Session Abstract: Is your organization considering cloud computing? Are you tired of hearing about simplistic (email and calendaring), enterprise irrelevant (Twitter, Facebook), and extreme (Google Datacenter) use cases? You aren’t alone. In this session, government and enterprise practitioners will discuss the cloud computing use cases they are considering, actively pursuing, and rejecting. In addition to the use case specifics, the panelists will share insights on financial benefits, true implementation costs, assessing and managing risk, governance, standards and their cloud computing wish list.

Moderators: David W. Cearley, Gartner and Richard Soley, OMG / SOA Consortium

Panelists: Clark Dorman of Next Century, Andy Lapkin of Kelley Blue Book, Joseph Larizza of Fieldpoint Private Bank & Trust

Introductions:

Clark Dorman: Specific use case, analyst in DoD collects a lot of images, genetic algorithm to review images.  Use cloud computing to optimize processing.  Started with in 18k server, got output in 8-14 days.  Now, use Amazon EC2, 100 images at a time, 12 hours, get run done for $130.  There is an opportunity to parallelize further and reduce runtime in half again.

Picked EC2 because it is the biggest.  Clark mentions Eucalyptus as way to hedge against lock-in.  Use Appistry to orchestrate startup and runtime execution.

Andy Lapkin: Looking at cloud, on premise they pay for availability, not for use.  Build KBB.com to peak.  This is expensive, for off-hours, plus hedge against growth.  Sized for extra 25%.  Example of unexpected traffic was “cash for clunkers” program.  A second use case is in data management.  KBB has a lot of data not shown on website that is used to produce website.  Also, data provider to car dealerships, etc.  Data management work is done in batch.

KBB uses Azure and SQL Azure for their cloud computing environment.  KBB is a Microsoft shop.  Now, testing KBB.com failover site in Azure in SQL Azure.  Biggest lesson learned: Transition to cloud is as good as your application maintenance. 

Joseph Larizza:  Customers are high net worth individuals, mostly from financial services industry.  The IT budget is a shoestring, similar to community banking.  Joseph has big banking background.  Some providers Digital Insight, Rackspace.  Full banking site, portal to members, all in the cloud.  Core competency is banking, not data center management.  Cost is critical factor.

Risk Question: Look at it as risk ledger.  Responsiveness of provider vs. key employee risk.  Compliance can be provided by cloud, more effectively than if done internally.  Surprise, the amount of support you need to do, such as patching, backups, security.

Online banking application, could have built their own.  But, not core competency.  Could never keep up with feature/function of a Digital Insight.  Instead, use Digital Insight, which is an Intuit company.  Core banking platform is all in the cloud. 

Implemented single sign-on across these applications; does have Fieldpoint branding.

Q: Security Concerns?

Joseph: Rackspace compliance and security, third party providers, learn their procedures.  They are careful about what data is stored in the cloud.  Didn’t elaborate further on this.

Andy: Security isn’t biggest concern, given the type of business application.

Clark: VPN on their side, SSH into Amazon.  Data isn’t classified, but still don’t want to “leak all over”.  Data is encrypted on the fly.  No data resides in the cloud.  Data is brought up at startup.  Have very specific startup process.  (Again, use Appistry)

Q: SLA with Amazon?  Is the data really gone when the images are shut down?

Clark: Matter of trust, trust that policy and agreements will be adhered to.  Security isn’t a thing, it’s a process.

Q: Cost of moving the data, latency?

Clark: For this use case, 6-8 hours of processing, 20 minutes worth of data movement isn’t an issue. 

Q: What is your interest in standards in the cloud computing space?  Cloud interoperability?  Avoid lock-in?

Joseph: Very interested in the ability to move cloud to cloud, for risk management, and to move work closest to current customer base (time zone).

Clark: Want to develop application at highest level you can.  Make the lower levels someone else’s problem.

Andy: Not moving everything to the cloud.  Will always have a mixed model.  Will always have datacenter to fall back on.  The real issue is the operations work to move from running on one cloud to another.

Q: New job roles?

Andy: Monitor the same way as on-premise.  Use Keynote for monitoring. 

Joseph: Think about operations (backup and security) differently.  Can’t just stick equipment in the mix.  Don’t have control over the equipment.

Clark: Systems administration changes to cloud administration.  Don’t worry about hardware layer, but still need to manage the environment (to deliver the application).

Q:  Old wine in new bottles?

Clark – what’s new is dynamic nature, speed that you can do things, low costs.  8 cents for CPU hour. 

Andy: Spin up new instance in 6 minutes.  Scale, knowing you can serve 14 million visitors a month.

Q: What needs to improve in cloud computing?

Andy: Azure needs third party support for management tools.  Doesn’t want to write his own.  Needs tooling to sift through all the log data.

Q: [for Clark]  Your project is a proof of concept, if DoD accepts this product, will it remain in the cloud, or move somewhere else?

Clark: It is up to the government to decide.  The government does have a few clouds – NIST, DISA Race, and GSA Apps.gov.  This application could land on existing government cloud.

Q: [for Andy] Considered running base load on premise, then burst peak to the cloud?

Andy: Something they are considering.

Q: [for Joseph] Said want to get to zero servers, does that mean Opex will outpace Capex?  Is that ok?

Joseph: Not for their size.  In general, economic model is service first, no related employee expense, if not appropriate, have inside.

Andy: KBB uses SaaS applications to run business, such as CRM (Salesforce.com)

SOA Consortium Declares Mission Success, Announces Future Plans

  Today, the SOA Consortium declared success on its advocacy mission to help the Global 1000, major government agencies and mid-market business successfully adopt SOA by 2010.  The SOA Consortium’s declaration is supported by recent industry research, the high value case studies submitted to its case study contest, and industry momentum around business and technology strategies that are dependent upon a SOA foundation.

From today’s press release:

“When the SOA Consortium began, SOA was more of a fringe methodology that only a few organizations were doing with any great success, rather than an accepted part of an overall business strategy. Three years later, we see corporations large and small using the principles of SOA to enhance their overall business and technology strategies,” said Richard Mark Soley, executive director, SOA Consortium. “As we move forward in the drive towards Business Ecology, the combined BPM/SOA Consortium will continue to engage with the business community to show how SOA can be a valuable part of their business optimization efforts.”

According to Gartner Vice President and Distinguished Analyst W. Roy Schulte, “the term ‘SOA’ was coined by Gartner, and Gartner published the first reports on it in 1996. However, widespread mainstream adoption only appeared after 2005. SOA is a durable change in application architecture, like the relational database and graphical user interface. It is the natural evolution of distributed computing — it is distributed computing done right. SOA is already the dominant architectural style for business applications. Virtually all CIOs are somewhere on the road to SOA, either starting or far along. SOA principles are timeless; no replacement is in sight.”

In a recent conversation with Joe McKendrick, Forrester’s Randy Heffner spoke of SOA adoption levels that match the SOA Consortium’s goal of 75% adoption rates by the Global 1000 by 2010.

“By the end of this year, 75% of the global 2000, that’s folks with 20,000 or more employees, say that they’ll be using SOA,” Randy continues. “When we asked, ‘Are you satisfied?’ roughly 25% says that SOA has provided most or all of the benefits that they expected. There’s another 30 to 40% that said, ‘It’s provided less than we expected, but still enough benefit that we’re expanding our use of SOA.’”

Interestingly, in that conversation, Heffner pointed out the greatest success comes from business-driven SOA approaches, exactly what the SOA Consortium has been advocating from the onset.

“What do the 25% moving full force into SOA have in common? “They’re treating SOA as a business-design concept,” Randy says. “That sets a whole different perspective on how you view the kinds of services that you’re building, the methods that you put around it.””

In addition to declaring victory, the SOA Consortium announced its future plans to merge with OMG’s BPM Consortium:

“The SOA Consortium will be continuing its advocacy efforts as part of the new BPM/SOA Consortium, which also ties in with the Business Ecology™ Initiative. The Business Ecology Initiative is focused on erasing the constraining lines between business and Information Technology (IT) so that IT becomes a ubiquitous, integral and vital asset to the company and leads decision-making, structural change and enterprise-wide quality initiatives, drives efficiency and revenue, and provides measurable, clear return on investment.”

SOA Consortium Activities and Transition

Timing:  The merger between the SOA and BPM Consortiums will be completed by 2009 year end.  The first event of the merged BPM/SOA Consortium is the BPM and SOA in the Clouds Symposium, to be held December 8-9, 2009, in Long Beach, CA.  Organizations and individuals interested in participating in that program should refer to this open call for participation.

Working Groups:  With the completion of the 2009 SOA Consortium | CIO magazine case study contest, the Executive Suite SOA working group has completed its charter. 

SOA Community of Practice is working on an “Everyday SOA” paper that describes the key concepts in our services, portfolios, management units and IT landscape diagram.  The group intends to deliver the paper in December 2009.

The Enterprise Architecture in the 2010s working group is working on a discussion oriented position paper on how a formalized business architecture contributes to Business and IT success.  

SOA Consortium Publications:  All SOA Consortium publications (papers, podcasts, presentations, blog posts) will remain available to the public at their current locations.  This includes the forthcoming working group papers.

Consortium Leadership: The joint BPM / SOA Consortium will be managed by Karen Larkowski, current program director of the BPM Consortium and General Manager of the Business Ecology Initiative.

Thank You!

On a personal note, I’d like to thank everyone who has contributed to the success of the SOA Consortium.  This long list starts with our members and sponsors, and includes all invited speakers, executive summit and symposium attendees, our pundit friends (analysts, press, bloggers, thought leaders), the OMG team, and every SOA practitioner who raised the bar (and value) in his/her organization from SOA as “just a bunch of web services” (JBOWS) to SOA Means Business.