SOA Consortium Insights

SOA Consortium Practitioner Panels at Gartner's AADI & EA Summits - June 11 & 13

In what's becoming a habit, the SOA Consortium will once again host practitioner panels at Gartner's AADI and EA Summits.  We have two great panels lined up. 

On Wednesday, June 11 at AADI, Todd Biske, Melvin Greer and Mike Kavis will be talking about measuring the value of SOA.  Knowing the panelists, I'm sure the discussion will go beyond 'code reuse'.  The panel will be moderated by Gartner's Daniel Sholler and SOA-C's Richard Soley.

"In this session, several practitioners will share firsthand experience of justifying and measuring the value of their service-oriented architecture (SOA) activities: How to make the initial business case and continuously demonstrate the benefits? What metrics to use? What return on investment (ROI) to expect? What challenges have they encountered, and how did they overcome them?"

On Friday, 13 June at EA, John Williams, Maja Tibbling and Marty Colburn will join Todd to discuss SOA & EA lessons learned from the trenches.  This panel will be moderated by Gartner's Bruce Robertson and SOA-C's Richard Soley.

"In this user panel, co-moderated by Gartner and the SOA Consortium, several enterprise architecture (EA) practitioners will look at the links, synergies and dependencies between service-oriented architecture (SOA) and EA. How does SOA fit into the EA picture? How can it help make EA more valuable? Does SOA need to be part of a broader EA? Hear the first-hand experience and lessons learned from our panelists, and ask them your own SOA/EA questions."

If you are attending the Gartner events, I highly recommend stopping by these sessions for insights from real-world practitioners. 

Enterprise Architecture 2010 Talk-- Where EA Means Business -- at SAP ASUG on May 5, 2008

On Monday, I'll be representing the SOA Consortium's EA2010 working group at SAP's ASUG conference in, you guessed it, sunny Orlando.  I'll be giving a talk on our EA2010 work.  Areas of discussion include 21st century business, service-orientation, business architecture, enterprise architecture and enterprise architects.  If you are attending the show, please come by, Monday at 9:30-10:30, in 308C. 

If you'd like to connect at the show, I'll be at the Sunday evening ESOA Community Networking Session and taking in sessions and wandering around the expo floor on Monday.  Drop me an email at bmichelson at gmail dot com.

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.

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.

Audio available from the Gartner Summit

Back in June I reported on a couple of SOA Consortium sessions at events in California and Tennessee.  In particular, there was a great panel at the Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit in Nashville, featuring several active SOA Consortium members talking about their SOA implementation experiences.

Thanks to the helpful folks at Gartner Events, we are able to post the audio from this excellent panel, which can be downloaded here.  At almost 14MB, it might take a few minutes to download, but it's worth a listen.  The insights from Nida Davis Roemer (CTO of the American Red Cross), Yoav Intrator (Chief Architect of Deutsche Bank) and our own Ground-Floor SOA leader, Surekha Durvasula (Kohl's Department Stores) are all worthwhile.

Our partnership with Gartner continues in December, with SOA Consortium sessions at both the Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit and the Enterprise Architecture Summit.  Don't miss us at these excellent, colocated events!

SOA Consortium at BPM Think Tank

This week, I'm representing the SOA Consortium at BPM Think Tank.  Why an SOA advocacy group at a BPM event?  Simple.  During our first Executive Summit series in February, leading CIOs and CTOs implored us to help "break the artificial divide between SOA and BPM".  From their point of view, SOA and BPM are complements:

“SOA, BPM, Lean, Six Sigma are all basically one thing (business strategy and structure) that must work side by side”. – CTO during SOA Executive Summit

An excerpt from our Executive Summit whitepaper expands on this statement:

The CIO and CTO participants think about SOA from a top-down business view. That view starts with business processes, expands into business activities, associates those activities to the balance sheet, and then considers the required business services to accomplish those activities. These business services are not at the discrete technical implementation level. Rather, the business services refer to services provided by humans, or machines.

Essentially, these executives see SOA as the means to “execute the business model”. For this to transpire, the methods to define and record this executable business model, and the supporting technology must be seamless. In the minds of IT executives, SOA and BPM related products are used in concert to accomplish one goal, despite the discrete technology industry packaging.

The SOA Consortium shares this view.  SOA and BPM are complementary strategies.  Each delivers business value on its own.  But, used together, the business value amplifies.

While I'm here, I'll be participating on a SOA and BPM panel, and I'll be engaging in conversations with BPM community leaders on how we can collaborate to "break the artificial divide between SOA and BPM".

If you are using SOA and BPM together and would like to share your insights and/or stories, feel free to leave a comment, or send me an email: brenda at soa-consortium.org

Mass Technology Leadership Council’s SOA Governance Event - Member Guest Post from Dr. Burc Oral

Dr. Burc Oral, one of our SOA Consortium members, shares insights from last week's Mass Technology Leadership Council event.  Feel free to leave comments or questions for Burc.  Burc's post:

On June 21^st, I was a panelist at the Mass Technology Leadership Council’s SOA Governance Event, representing the SOA Consortium. There were approximately 35 participants at this round-table like event.

Following a short presentation to IBM’s SOA Governance model by Mark Colan, our moderator, Walter Kuketz, CTO, Collaborative Consulting kicked off the panel discussion. Panel participants:

• John Bularzik, Program Management Office, State Street
• Dan Foody, CTO, Actional and Sonic Software
• Guy Loewy, Founder and CTO, WebLayers
• Dr. Burc Oral, Sr. Architect, Cellexchange (SOA Consortium member)
• Kevin Rodin, Former CIO, Iron Mountain
• Stephanos Bacon, Vice President, Product Development, Iona Technologies

Some key concerns and efforts of the audience about SOA Governance were:

• Creating a Center of Excellence
• Establishing a SOA repository
• Incurring costs
• Managing application level services
• Degree of SOA competency by seekers of venture funds
• Designing a governance model
• Promoting interoperability
• Organization of services and their granularity
• Transition to target architecture

We focused on the following topics

• Standards. State of the standards in the SOA space and their governance
• PMO. Challenges in project management in SOA Governance
• Predictions. What is the 2 year outlook for SOA Governance

Standards

I gave a brief review of SOA consortium and its efforts to harmonize the landscape of standards, specifications, and recommendations. I mentioned that Consortium has brought multiple standards bodies together and working to create dialogue. I also explained the efforts to establish a Standards repository by the OMG SOA SIG. I had to wait till the afternoon to see the very first SOA Standards Repository built using MDA at our OMG SOA SIG meeting. So, I could not tell about this fantastic tool.

Other comments from the panelists and participants were:

• Open source is yet another de facto standard
• There is constant vigilance on the user side to keep up with the versions of the standards
• Product and user environments often has a mismatch in the standard version
• Standards are another set of tools
• Defining corporate policy to clear out this mess is crucial
• Establish re-use early and create funding of the efforts
• There is mandate internally on the standards but this breaks down with the vendors supporting different version of standards
• Inward and outward facing standards—in some cases there is a distinction; in other cases the line disappears
• Different policies for Internal and External Services.
• “Yesterday’s external services are today’s internal services in the face of M&A”, Kevin Roden
• Center of excellence is a approach for SOA Governance
• Governance comes first in the incremental adoption of SOA
• “Business process modeling has to come first”, Kevin Roden
• Governance for Standards is necessary: which standards for what Purpose, exceptions, documentation
• Look at Governance early

PMO

On PMO challenges the panel and the participants talked about:

• Transparency
• standard design
• compliance
• aligning business properties
• governance for IT/Delivery/Operations
• put controls around services about its reuse to prevent from increase in usage volume—think scalability
• Incubation period may be necessary for services to be reused
• “When silos come down, there will be a hurrah!”
• Cannot guess how a service will be reused, so put processes around reuse
• Governance requires a significant cultural change
• Reuse but not so blindly
• Consumption behavior needs to be regulated
• Who owns the service? Creator or operator? We may have to establish a stewardship similar to data. Data model owners and the database base owners are different

Predictions

There was no agreement on the timeline for organizations fully establish SOA Governance. The panelists did not see a two-year time frame plausible. A five-year horizon seemed to be more achievable. We all agreed on the importance of Governance and that it will require significant business transformation. This, in turn, will require business process management practices pervasively established in the organizations.

I remarked that while some countries have democracy as their governance model others have despots or kings. Better yet, there are several flavors of democracy. Alas, the world is still spinning. Just like the governance models of sovereign nations across the globe dynamically vary, there will be multiple SOA Governance models. There are already several of them out there. Just like governments change, models for SOA Governance will transform into newer ones. As we embrace this diversity, it is up to each enterprise to choose a SOA Governance model which they feel comfortable but without any further delay.

Posteriori Observations

“It is a jungle out there” says the opening song in the TV series Monk. Whether we like it or not we are deep in the SOA jungle and earlier we start easier it becomes to navigate through obstacles. We need to keep reminding ourselves that SOA is not about technology but about business strategy and SOA Governance, a subset of overall governance, is all about order. Implementing SOA as a business strategy in an orderly fashion calls for business transformation and organizational change.

Ready and willing will clear out of the jungle and will climb Mount SOA. No climb is a solo journey, however. The rise of Web 2.0 and social networking stand as an excellent reminder for the wisdom of crowds. Increasing number of businesses and government agencies are choosing the SOA Consortium as a medium to collaborate to their mutual benefit in SOA, and specifically in SOA Governance (e.g., measuring effectiveness, controlling for compliance, communication to inform all parties, guiding with policies empowering for better decision making).

SOA Consortium in Europe

Next week, the SOA Consortium is hosting two events in Brussels.  We start on Tuesday June 26, with an Executive Summit.  Our Executive Summits are  exclusive, invitation-only, vendor-free, events held quarterly, in major cities around the world.   We invite business-focused CIOs and CTOs who are actively pursuing SOA.  During the Summits, we have two related activities.  First, in a focus group style presentation, we share our mission, strategies and tactics, with the sole purpose of receiving candid feedback from this core constituency.  Second, we engage the group in a peer roundtable conversation on the opportunities, success factors, challenges, and impediments of SOA adoption.  Of course, I say "first" and "second", but if our US Summits were any indication, the roundtable will embed within the presentation and new insights and relationships will be gained by all.  Similar to the US Summits, the Top 5 Insights will be made public.  Watch this space for more information.

On Wednesday and Thursday, we are hosting the quarterly meeting of the SOA Consortium.  This meeting is designed for members and non-members to interact around the topic of business-driven SOA.  Our agenda is a mix of invited speakers, working group updates, a European BPM ThinkTank update, and a SOA Governance Roundtable to be recorded as a podcast.

Invited Speaker Sessions at the SOA Consortium Meeting:

Nicolai M. Josuttis on SOA Reality and Organizational Consequences

   
• Why Large Systems are Different
   
• The Impact of Multiple Owners in a Distributed System Landscape
   
• Real World Examples for the Influence of Performance
   
• Web Services
   
• The Best Way to Establish and Govern SOA

Clive Read on Business Relevance of SOA

   
• Business Relevance of SOA
   
• Business Agility and Enterprise Architecture Thinking
   
• Designing SOA Infrastructure for Business Value

On Thursday, the Integration Consortium joins in, with SOA User Experience Stories, and a talk by Steve Craggs -- SOA is Rubbish!

If you are near Brussels, please consider joining us.  If you aren't near Brussels, we will share some highlights here.

TechTarget and Gartner events

Last week I presented at two events representing the Consortium.  Unfortunately both of them (TechTarget's CIO Decisions conference and Gartner's Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit) were literally on the same days.  Unfortunately, they were not literally in the same city.  Or even the same state.

Thank you American Airlines for being on-time!  The solution was to cover the TechTarget CIO conference in Carlsbad very quickly and then run off to Nashville for the Gartner conference, which I did.  I hope to not have to do that again, as the CIO event was excellent-200 CIO's, by invitation only, and the quality was superb.  The keynoter, André Mendes (CIO of the Special Olympics) delivered a stirring call to arms to CIO's to be leaders, innovaters and transformers in their organizations.  Delivering that message to the SOA Consortium community, including CIO's, business analysts & enterprise architects, is important and I'm talking about that with him.  My presentation (”Making the SOA Leap) gave an overview of what we are doing and some early results.  There was definitely interest in participation from the CIO's on-site, and we are following up.

Even more exciting, however, was the Gartner event in Nashville.  While I was in Carlsbad, John Turato (CTO of Avis Budget Group) gave a keynote representing the SOA Consortium.  I'm hoping to hear that soon as obviously I couldn't hear it on that day.

Of the 800 or so attendees at the conference, about 230-250 came to the SOA Consortium session on Wednesday in which Yefim Natis (Gartner Vice President & Distinguished Analyst) and I co-chaired a panel of SOA Consortium participants.  These included Nida Davis Roemer (CTO of the American Red Cross), Yoav Intrator (Chief Architect of Deutsche Bank) and our own Ground-Floor SOA leader, Surekha Durvasula (Kohl's Department Stores).  Though I came prepared with questions, the audience began participating even before our panelists had a chance to finish giving two-minute position statements!  We're working with Gartner to get audios of the panel (and John Turato's talk) available from the SOA Consortium web site and here on this blog).  Watch this space for more information.

There's no question that Service Oriented Architecture was the hottest topic at the Gartner event, and there was plenty of buzz after the panel about it being one of the most useful events at the conference.  At the end of the panel I summed up the discussion with the five themes that I felt came out of the discussion:

• Modeling Counts.  Of course, as Chairman of the Object Management Group also, that wasn't a surprise to me!  In fact OMG is working on SOA modeling standards.  The interesting by-product of modeling SOA systems, however, was pointed out by an audience member: that modeling provides a "”common ground" for business & IT to agree and work together.

• Business Agility is the Strategic Driver.  This isn't a surprise to any follower of the Consortium!  But it certainly was good to hear it, many times.  SOAP and WSDL and UDDI aren't the issue: strategic development and integration are.  All the panelists and several audience members made it clear that which technology is used for integration is a distant second to focusing development on integration.

• Most Shops are Already Doing SOA.  This came out of a short discussion of what SOA is and isn't; there was very general agreement that it isn't a new idea, and even late-adopters are probably already "”doing SOA."

• Measure, Measure, Measure.  If the point is being able to easily integrate and re-orchestrate existing processes, then the quality and performance of those processes are important!  Metrics are critical for business process that are going to be heavily leveraged.

• Sharing Experience is Critical.  Well that doesn't surprise any of us either; that's the point of the SOA Consortium, to share our experiences.

Discussions on other topics - standards, SOA hype, and the complementarity of BPM and SOA - fit very well with the results from our Executive Summits and the roadmaps of where the Consortium is headed.  This was some great visibility for the SOA Consortium (and it appears it will be a source of several new members as well!).