Making Sense of SOA Blog : SOA

SOA buzz for a new year

kellyemo — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:32:00 GMT

Happy New Year! Well, actually it is a happy new year for Hewlett-Packard as our Fiscal year 2010 began November 1^st.

As I look back at 2009 it was a very interesting year for SOA... First, SOA was dead, and then the SOA zombies started blogging and talking about what is working about SOA.

Later in the year, given the economic situation, the blogging turned much more pragmatic with discussions regarding whether SOA efforts could be sustained in this cost-cutting environment.

I think we've ended up in a good place now in terms of the energy and discussion around SOA. Most of what I'm reading now and throughout the discussions I'm engaging in involve talk about best practices and pragmatic advice. We know SOA is here to stay, now let's talk about those organizations and proven processes that really put SOA to work and return results to the business.

That said, there's been a bunch of good discussion on eBizQ. Last week, eBizQ had their SOA in Action virtual conference. One of the best sessions was the keynote from Forrester's Randy Heffner who laid out how to resolve the biggest SOA mistakes (the "seven deadly SOA sins" of sorts) - and two of them dealt with not enough focus on Governance. Listen to Randy's replay here.

Secondly, the eBizQ forums are buzzing with practical SOA advice... Check out these threads:

In SOA Governance, who has the authority?

This thread has some great discussion about thinking about governance -vs.- authority and the benefits of using a Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) to define, communicate and manage governance decisions and accountability.

Is SOA ever a tactical discipline or is it always strategic?

This thread has some lively dialog about what does it mean to be tactical or strategic. The statement, "SOA, by its nature, is a strategic concept but can be executed tactically" provides the crux of the dialog but as you will read, the devil is in the details... How do you stay focused on strategic goals while executing in the trenches? Read the thoughts in this thread.

Make sure you catch the discussions around Cloud and SOA for instance, what are the top issues when cloud computing and SOA converge?

The buzz is out there, join in! Let us know what you think on these and other topics, post a comment here or on the eBizQ SOA Forum.

Showcase your SOA Success -- Call for Papers -- HP Software Universe EMEA

kellyemo — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 20:23:00 GMT

HP Software Universe in Europe this year comes to Germany. Hamburg, Germany to be exact, during December 15-18, 2009. The timing and venue will allow attendees and speakers to enjoy the festive holiday atmosphere and collaborate with peers and HP Software SOA experts and executives.

While December sounds like a long time away, it's a relatively short three months and we are collecting abstracts now. We are accepting speaking abstracts of two types:

Business Abstracts: To focus on customer successes with HP software and best practices that are returning real results to the business -- In terms of SOA, success stories with real ROI, best practices for effecting organizational change and process improvements and other aspects of SOA adoption that are returning business results

Technical Abstracts: Use cases, implementation success stories, tips and tricks and other areas of interest to the technical stakeholders and potential users of SOA solutions.

Tell your story! Collaborate with your peers and enjoy the event! -- submit abstracts at this link here by September 4th, 2009

The need is the same, only the name has changed -- Both SOA and Cloud-based architectures crave governance

kellyemo — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 20:51:00 GMT

eBizQ on their SOA forum just posted a threaded discussion topic which got a few of us on "team SOA" talking:

How Will SOA Vendors Adapt to the Emerging Cloud Paradigm?

This eBizQ thread is thought provoking all the way around about what changes and challenges Cloud can impose on IT organizations planning to source Cloud-based services in their solutions and whether the products and capabilities delivered by what have been traditionally called SOA platform and/or SOA governance vendors will continue to be useful for IT as they move to leverage Cloud. I think it's key to think hard about these questions, with a perspective of what IT is going to need and what today's solutions actually do...perhaps with more of a focus on the people and processes rather than the underlying technologies enabling these kinds of solutions.

I firmly believe that governance is a must-have for adoption of Cloud services or applications. In Dave Linthicum's blog, he states that design-time SOA governance solutions may be at risk. There are, at least, three different aspects to the adoption of Cloud-based services which should be familiar to those who have been effectively employing SOA Governance solutions thus far:

1. Establishing the relationship between enterprise IT and a cloud-based service provider (regardless of the kind of service being consumed) demands some measure of process. Enterprise IT should broker the selection, procurement (incl. negotiating payment terms), and publishing/exposure of approved cloud-based services to their internal constituents.

2. Next, applications built to leverage cloud-based services (either Infrastructure-as-a-Service or Platform-as-a-Service) are going to have to be built to comply with the constructing organization's design-time goals (to ensure quality, interoperability, performance, backward and forward compatibility as examples). As a sidebar, I have seen poorly performing applications written in a wide variety of technologies. But, in the context of cloud, you will absolutely PAY for more CPU, etc. based on usage. It seems prudent that performance validation is essential when consuming IaaS.

3. Finally, comprehensive lifecycle governance that drives consistency through shared best practices and policy management becomes even more critical as organizations continue towards a mixed mode of service delivery (i.e. a combination of in-house, on-premise applications either built or bought along with an outsourced or off-premise XaaS offerings). Enterprise IT is still responsible for ensuring a stable and reliable compute platform for their business stakeholders regardless of the means upon which that is delivered. In addition, the monitoring and enforcement of a variety of corporate (or other regulated) policies is also still up to traditional IT departments to enforce; regardless of the ways in which these composite systems are assembled.

What we've learned from SOA governance should actually provide IT with the blueprint and tools they need to support these processes and activities. And,

Products providing technical governance (SOA and otherwise) that don't take a comprehensive lifecycle approach will be less attractive to IT anyway regardless of the adoption of cloud-based services and we are seeing this play out in the market through increasing customer requirements and product evolutions. What I'm hearing is that organizations want solutions that integrate across the lifecycle from portfolio planning to design and testing to delivery and on-going operations with transparency and sharing of key metadata to drive decisions in real-time. For example with Cloud-based services, if the teams responsible for operations and ensuring critical SLAs have visibility into the criteria by which the service was designed and tested, they can then know the services' underlying architectural characteristics and how such services will respond to levels of consumption (service elasticity, performance profiles and so forth). There is much less margin for error in a Cloud model as SLA delivery is assumed and issues can put Cloud vendors out of business.

Governance is about driving best practices, changing organizational behavior and making more intelligent decisions throughout a lifecycle of delivering solutions -- across application development teams and their operations counterparts...whether these solutions involve in-sourced development and integration or sourcing apps and services via SaaS or Cloud-based models.

So my final point? Yes, "SOA" governance vendors may be at risk; they are at risk of having to change the name of the game. Governance will be needed even more, but not just for SOA... it's time to get SOA off the island and consider it part of a larger modern IT approach that embraces legacy apps, service-orientation, SaaS and cloud sourced services, events, business processes, Rich internet apps and more. All of this needs governance, now

Making Sense of HP Software Universe -- A Look Back at Last Week's Event

kellyemo — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Last week, I spent a whirlwind four days at HP Software Universe, HP's bi-annual customer and user community event for all things software. Between the content-rich interactions with customers, attending and managing sessions, and informal meetings with partners and colleagues, not to mention dinners and excellent wine (can we say "food coma"), it was a productive week but has taken me at least that to recover... thus the belated blogs this month.

That said, I don't want to bore you all with my chronological review of a week in Vegas. (no I did not gamble and take home a jackpot or lose it all and sound like a country ballad - lost my house, car, dog.. etc), rather, I'll just share a few insights that I heard and what it means to making sense of SOA.

1. Insight #1 - SOA is not dead. Have we heard enough about this already? The debate continues unabated in cyberspace. That said, what I saw at HPSU was SOA everywhere yet SOA never upstage. Our partners showing testing tools, management solutions and best practices were talking services, composite applications, loosely coupled architectures - all things SOA as just core to what it is they do.

2 Insight #2 - Modern application styles are starting to really impact quality and testing teams and there are not a lot of proven best practices and success stories yet. We are at the "now we get it, we need to test inter-related project components in the context of a composite application, services that are used/consumed in multiple places but that don't have a UI, orchestrated business processes, and we are not sure how" phase. QA teams now have to take the reality of interdependent lifecycles, shared services and intermediaries seriously. Combine this with the desire to align development and QA closer together, embrace agile methodologies for testing earlier in the cycle, and in general deliver applications faster, better and cheaper, and QA is elevated to a lead role-a critical player in the entire lifecycle of delivering, changing and evolving composite applications.

The good news is that there are technologies to help; such as testing suites designed for the concept of shared, dependent and often "headless" services, and virtualization capabilities to enable testing services and interfaces that have dependencies on scarce resources (can we say mainframe?) without having to actually have the physical resource available. In fact, one buzz of HPSU was the interaction of HP service-oriented functional and performance testing solutions with ITKO's service virtualization solutions.

3. Insight #3 - Customers are doing governance and it's working... just not all at once, nor should it. For some reason, of late, governance has been getting a bit of a bad rap. I had more than one person ask me, should we even call it governance since it's a "dirty word"? I think the image of total lock-down, loss of flexibility and boiling the ocean comes to mind.

Reality couldn't be further from the truth and that's the message that vendors and customers need to get out in the industry as fast as possible to avoid a retreat back to the wild-west state of every development team just doing it's own thing or trying to herd cats using a combination of wiki's and spreadsheets.

What I saw at HP Software Universe were pragmatic implementations of SOA and more broadly, Application Governance that were working and returning real measurable value. I saw customers solving specific, well understood and agreed upon challenges with a combination of ownership, applied best practice, well-defined policy, and a flexible approach.

For instance, one customer is using HP's SOA Systinet solution to define the specific stages of a lifecycle of modernizing aspects of a major application overhaul. In the lifecycle definition, owners are clearly defined and a chronology of decisions regarding when the new version of the application component is ready to go live is not only documented but guided via software. Policies are applied to certain actions but not too many and what policies to apply have been determined via a key stakeholder voting process so that all teams who are impacted by the policy know why and what the rational is for the policy. For this customer, policies are mainly focused on design-time. They have run-time policy management as a goal but will begin that when the organization is ready.

I heard from another customer who is not ready to use governance yet to automate lifecycle hand-offs but who is effectively using it as a system of record and to go through a review process for what services to implement as shared services - the service candidate phase.

Finally, I heard from a customer who is using governance to document the whole "who, why, how and what would happen if we didn't do this" tribal knowledge aspect of policies. They use governance processes to thoroughly assess the top areas of pain, determine if they can be fixed through governance and the application of policy, have a vetting process to prioritize what to govern with policy, document all assumptions including clearly telling a story as to what is the negative outcome if the policy isn't followed, and then if the organization votes that this is a high priority policy to implement, uses the governance process to put the policy in action, and measure and tune the outcome over time.

In none of these examples, do we see "boil the ocean". It's pragmatic governance with a specific set of vetted organizational expectations being measured and delivering results.

So what is my take away from HP Software Universe in terms of making sense of SOA? SOA is here to stay, and everyone is trying to figure out how best to keep IT humming with the major changes SOA brings. There are real examples of best practices, new processes and the application of technology to make IT more successful in the modern application world and people will line up to hear them. If we are to keep the pace of modernization accelerating, we need to tell more of these anecdotes with less fluff and more real practice. And in the words of Paul Harvey, "and that's the rest of the story"

More to come on making sense of SOA...

Sapphire follow-up – Faster results from modern SAP applications with lifecycle management

kellyemo — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:59:00 GMT

Here’s the nirvana statement about the power of your SAP environment: SAP Environments thrive with precious business data. These are the corporate data jewels that are increasingly being used by organizations to create new revenue streams and to gain insights into business operations that when optimized can garner competitive advantage. Sounds compelling…

Getting better visibility into your business was one of the key themes at Sapphire 09 and SAP is providing a variety of development components and tools like SAP NetWeaver Development Studio, SAP Solution Manager and Enterprise Service Repository (ESR) all designed to help get better access and visibility into SAP business data and to better integrate third party tooling. This is good news.

Add to this, also at Saphire 09, customers consistently mentioned that they are embarking on projects to upgrade to the newer versions of SAP. Both Application modernization projects and projects like RunSAP, and Perfect Plant that will leverage existing SAP investments to operate business more efficiently are being undertaken more and more frequently.

However, good things don’t come easily and this is a good example. One of the most talked about challenges at Sapphire 09 was that attendees still did not have a good enough understanding of how to bridge the gap and communicate intents across their organizational silos such as development , QA and Operations in both SAP centric and heterogeneous landscapes. SAP tools provide useful mechanisms to develop the modern applications, out of the box services and components to be customized and support goals such as business data visibility, however as IT strives to re-use these components and artifacts, the gap between the development and production seems to be even wider.

HP SOA Systinet being a repository that reconciles the “different sources” of truth from development to operations can help to reduce the silos – the divide between development, QA and Production.

The integration of HP SOA Systinet with SAP Enterprise Service Repository (ESR) plus SAP NetWeaver Development Studio based on Eclipse (which also integrates with HP SOA Systinet) provides IT with a proven solution to synchronize information useful for the successful lifecycle management of services and components. Developers can search Systinet and find useful SAP and other services and related documents for re-use and testing and production teams have the metadata they need to more rapidly test and advance these new application components and services from development to deployment.

Ultimately, faster and better lifecycle management brings faster and better business results. Want to know how HP SOA Systinet and SAP Enterprise Service Repository are integrated? Access that information here. search for Systinet and find related documents.

SOA: Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated

soagreyhair — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 03:37:00 GMT

In a recent blog post by Anne Thomas Manes, the statement was made:

"SOA met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession."

HP, to paraphrase Steve Jobs among others, would respond by saying “SOA: Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated” From HP’s perspective, we are hoping that 2009 does not become the year that industry analysts are lumped in with the sensationalist journalism and quippy sound bites of the TV generation.

Depending on your view, such attention grabbing headlines while attempting to promote and inspire dialog will undoubtedly lead to unintended consequences.

Let’s start with the positives. The power of a controversial blog such as this one is that the post SHOULD drive people to think or re-think critically about the core issues. In this case, the issues that IT is grappling with. In many respects, there has been significant “pollution” of the acronym SOA and Anne is absolutely attempting to get the reader unwrapped from around the terminology axel. SOA is a “how”, not a “what”.

We think the key nugget in the blog is the message that the business doesn't fund "how’s", they fund “what’s”. We agree with Anne on the premise that IT should avoid technical jargon or TLA's like SOA when speaking to the business or attempting to get funding for projects from the business.

There are at least three statements that Anne made that we fundamentally agree with.

First: “Companies need to become more in tune with what businesses require and understand what the problems are”, she said. “What is required is an examination of application architecture rather than project-by-project integration.”

We firmly believe that for IT to continue to make progress on their quest for greater agility, they have to:

1) Align their spending objectives with business goals by understanding business priorities and the language of business (not of technology)

and

2) Add an architectural discipline to these business-driven projects rather than just perpetuating individual “technology projects” which result in the dreaded point-to-point solutions – actually have enterprise architecture and it is one driven by intent. (One that represents where you want to end up and not as a result of just what you did)

These two goals are often at odds and this is where the largest challenge for IT leadership exists in ’09 – how to think “global” while funding “local” – IT must have the larger architectural goals and vision defined and be able to translate that and it’s requirements to become part of actionable, specific, business-driven asks.

We believe that the best combination for IT funding and initiative success in ‘09 is having a business partner who fundamentally understands the challenges of IT and architecture, collaborating with an IT leader who is willing to eliminate technical jargon out of his vocabulary when aligning with the business partner and defining projects.Ultimately, IT may know how to design and deliver the solution—via SOA – but the business doesn’t need to know how the solution was delivered, just that is meet it’s objectives. The business does not want to see inside the IT “sausage factory” of sorts.

The second thought from Anne’s blog is a paraphrase of her statement about funding for SOA in ‘09. Funding for "technologies that support SOA--without a business driver" is going to be very difficult to secure in 2009. However, it’s not all gloom and doom. What we believe will continue, regardless of economic climate, is funding for projects that deliver specific and measurable value to the business! SOA is one of the best "hows" that IT has to deliver rapidly against business objectives.

This situation is similar to my recent car purchase… I bought a Hybrid vehicle. I didn't buy a Hybrid because I wanted to know how the Hybrid technology worked, I bought it to get 45 mpg.

Third and perhaps most critical, Anne points to the behavior and cultural changes that simply cannot be solved by deploying an Enterprise Service Bus and calling it SOA; “SOA is not simply a matter of deploying new technology and building service interfaces to existing applications; it requires redesign of the application portfolio. And it requires a massive shift in the way IT operates. The small select group of organizations that has seen spectacular gains from SOA did so by treating it as an agent of transformation.”

We couldn’t agree more. Until we, within enterprise IT, decide that sharing and collaboration leads to better, more agile, and, yes, stable solutions, we will be trapped in an escalating cost spiral which ultimately becomes the tipping point for the CIO to be fired. We ask this question frequently of our potential customers: “We know how we got here. Now, what are we going to do differently going forward?”

Now, the downside of these kinds of attention grabbing headlines is that most people don’t ACTUALLY read the entire post. Another example of a "grabber headline", which we were mailed over and over again, is from November 2008. There was a Gartner survey announcing the slowing of SOA Adoption. This is an interesting summarization of the actual survey, but if you look at the bottom of the article it says, “The survey found that adoption of SOA and plans for adoption vary widely by region. SOA adoption is nearly universal in Europe, moderate in North America, and lagging in Asia, Gartner said.” So, you shouldn’t need a PhD in statistics to understand that the adoption curve is likely to level off from previous years and decline when you reach a saturation point. Is it really a surprise that the adoption would slow when, according to the report, ALL of Europe has already gotten onboard?

As a vendor, we are told repeatedly by analysts that words matter. We have heard the message and we have understood. Where is the reciprocation? Unfortunately, there will be unintended consequences as a result of Anne's post; due to poor reading comprehension, misunderstanding, or both. You can see some of this forming based on the comments that are being provided back. People who are in violent disagreement or are calling Anne's credibility into question along with her depth of understanding of SOA. These people clearly don't know her background if that is the case. But, what is clear is that if analysts pursue this kind of strategy to get their message out, they will need to accept the unintended consequences.

So,is SOA dead? Absolutely not.

Should we attempt to expunge SOA from our vocabulary? Why would we try to attempt such a thing?

HP believes that SOA as a term is a lot like the “eBusiness” craze of the late 90’s. Who says “eBusiness” anymore? No one.

Did we have to go on a crusade to expunge this from people’s vocabularies? No.

It simply disappeared from our lexicon because eBusiness became part of what we do everday…business. We use the Internet as a ubiquitous delivery platform for applications, information, and now even virtualized computing platforms via Cloud. SOA, as a term, is going to follow this same route. That said, what needs to change is IT using SOA as their term du jour to get funding. That is a dead strategy. IT must speak in the language of business and the business doesn't care whether IT delivers results with SOA or bailing wire, just that it meets their requirements (exceeding expectations would be great, but most business people would be happy with meeting expectations as IT has been in the dog house of many organizations due to inflexibility and escalating costs). SOA happens to be one of the best mechanisms for IT to accomplish faster time to new services, business process rationalization, and a host of valuable solutions to digital business needs. We hope that the point about service-orientation and the non-technical aspects of adopting services are understood by those who actually read all of Anne’s post.

As a vendor of SOA software and solutions, we believe we are only successful when our customers are successful. No software provides value when it’s on the shelf. The big impact that the entire SOA community can have in 2009 is showing the application of SOA to business challenges and how IT are using SOA approaches to deliver real value to the business. Perhaps when we are done exceeding their expectations, we can share with them HOW we did it…if they care to peer inside the "sausage factory."

What’s needed now -- Pragmatic SOA with measurable results – in action at HP Software Universe

kellyemo — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 00:07:00 GMT

I think the industry has had enough of espousing the academic promise of SOA at this point. With economic pressures mounting, what we need to see are real results from pragmatic SOA adoption. The good news is that we are seeing real examples of measurable SOA success in action more and more frequently. Next week is HP Software Universe in beautiful Vienna, Austria. HP is planning a roster of speakers on the subject of SOA that are reflecting this theme. In particular, there is a focus on SOA Governance, which is proving to provide the guidance and discipline IT needs to ensure SOA stays on track. I plan to blog on the insights from this event shortly. However, to pique your interest, here are some of the planned sessions: On Tuesday, December 9^th, the Austrian Ministry of Finance will be speaking on adopting an IT Governance approach for SOA. Also on Tuesday, Telecom Italia will be sharing how they established a framework for service quality and reliability through SOA Governance. HP’s Tim Hall will be speaking on why SOA Governance is necessary to effectively navigate the SOA journey on Wednesday, December 10^th. Also on Wednesday you can hear from HP and one of our partners, Alcatel-Lucent, on how to establish secure SOA Governance for compliance. No flashy “SOA will save the world and slice your toast” presentations… just pragmatic, how-to presentations that will share how SOA and SOA Governance best practices will enable IT to achieve faster return on their SOA investments and keep the SOA train on the track. Stay tuned for the insights from this event. Also, if you missed the HP and IDC webcast last month that covered customer-experience-based best practices for successful SOA adoption, I encourage you to listen to the replay here.

Chasing HP

soagreyhair — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 21:44:00 GMT

On Monday, October 5th, HP announced our latest SOA Governance product suite; HP SOA Systinet 3.00. This product was made generally available during the summer, but we held off on the announcement for a number of good reasons. First, much of Europe is on vacation during August. Second, HP was in the midst of acquiring a little services company called EDS. But, third, and perhaps most important, we wanted to put it in the hands of real customers and publish some actual results.

Over the past few weeks, there have been a number of announcements by competitors that demonstrate that HP continues to lead the pack and set the agenda for comprehensive SOA solutions which include providing unique capabiliteis to address the issues of SOA Governance, Quality and Management. It is true that our solutions are made up of a number of products acquired over the past few years, but they also include a significant amount of intellectual property created over the past seven years; we have completed our integration and are full speed ahead on execution. Further, the solutions are available now, not next quarter or next year and customers can take advantage of these capabilities and our expertise embedded within these products immediately.

HP set out to pull together the best companies in the software space and in so doing a comprehensive strategy around how to address the SOA solutions market. Customers have made investements in middleware platforms which provide capabilities to expose and consume services, but these are technology centric attempts to solve problems which are simply not technological in nature. Companies who are reaping the benefits of SOA are doing so through a combination of organizational and technological transformations to move away from "capability-centric" IT delivery and adopt "service-orientation" at their core.

So, as HP continues to see companies attempt to meld together their strategies, playing catch up, and attempting to determine where SOA is taking them. HP continues to describe what success looks like and provide concrete results with our customers to guide the way forward.

You can find a Flash-based demo of the product here: http://www.hp.com/go/soa (under learn more on the right).

Begin with the end in mind -- More thought on "Does SOA Adoption Matter?"

kellyemo — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:50:00 GMT

I’d like to provide another perspective on the question of “does SOA adoption matter”?

I believe we may be asking the wrong question.

First of all SOA is a how, rather than a what. It describes an architectural, organizational and cultural approach for enabling IT to more quickly create or leverage their digital investments, sometimes through trusted re-use, to meet changing business requirements now and over time. That said, IT may chose to acquire new technologies to assist in adopting the SOA approach. These technologies may involve new standards such as Web Services, new application stacks, new integration tools, new platforms to manage the lifecycles of services, to manage service quality, or to enable loosely coupled policy enforcement. Many people equate the adoption and deployment of such technologies as “SOA adoption” or equate SOA adoption to the building out of Web Services.

To me, what matters is IT’s transformation to an organization that can more rapidly respond to the business and even become a driver of new business opportunity. The transformation to a Service Oriented Architecture (emphasis on the cultural shift to “service-oriented” and the methodological shift implicit in the word “architecture) is one of the most proven methods to assist IT in achieving these goals. In that sense, adoption of SOA matters.

That said, however, the most valuable metrics for IT to measure are not “SOA adoption” but rather business-driven metrics such as improvement in time to service, improvement in service up-time, improvement in customer satisfaction, or more efficiency in IT or business processes and resource utilization. This is not to say that IT won’t need to measure tactic and execution metrics. These metrics, such as how long it takes to build a Web Service, how much re-use is occurring and how long it takes to implement a new technology, are key to ensure the IT project managers responsible for the service development, composite application development or infrastructure implementation are staying on track and meeting project objectives. But the measure of SOA success is in its ability to enable IT to increase their value to the business.

A good example of this line of thinking is illustrated in a recently published IDC Business Value Assessment of an HP customer who achieved a 327% ROI by adopting SOA. The key metrics pertained to time to service, decreased downtime and increased customer retention. More about the value study can be found here.

In addition, a great quote can be found in a recent ZapThink article: Investing in SOA in a Down Economy. A paragraph in the article addresses a question asked by a client, “when is the best place to start a SOA initiative?” Author Ronald Schmelzer goes on to state, “Start by focusing on the business, and more specifically, a business process. When you talk in terms of business process, you’re talking the same language that business talks, and miraculously, you’ve achieved business-IT alignment."

So, my answer to “does SOA adoption matter?” Yes, when it results in positive business outcomes. It’s the means, not the end.

Does SOA Adoption Matter?

soajam — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 03:55:00 GMT

So, listen, it is now 2008. I have had many of SOA related conversations over the years. One thing that still pops up in SOA conversations is the concept of "SOA Adoption". Typically it comes up in a context of a conversation where people use contribution to "SOA Adoption" as a measure of the goodness of a given activity.

For example, I often hear people talk about activities in the following way - "I will do activity X if it will help drive SOA adoption", or "activity Y is good, but it doesn't really drive SOA adoption".

As I hear people talk this way, it makes me think that they perceive SOA Adoption is an end to unto itself. I'd like to understand what other people think about this as well.

So, "Does SOA Adoption Really Matter"?

Please share your thoughts and I will gladly respond in kind.

If Al Gore can win a Nobel Peace Prize, can HP and SOA bring peace to IT?

soagreyhair — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:40:00 GMT

In case you missed the news from last October (2007), former U.S. Vice President Al Gore was a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for his work to raise awareness of global warming. Now, Al Gore took some good natured ribbing a few years ago for his misstatement about being the guy who “invented” the Internet. But, somewhere in the dark corners of my brain I started thinking about the peace prize, the Web, enterprise IT and the adoption of SOA. I realize this seems a bit disconnected. Let me explain.

If you’ve ever worked in an IT organization with more than 1 employee, you know that people don’t always agree on things like:

· How to problem solve (this include identifying the problems and then fixing them)?

· What and where to invest (either from a strategic perspective or in terms of problem mitigation)?

· What kinds of technologies should be used (this includes everything from operating system choices to programming languages and tools)?

Even if everyone agreed on these things within the organization, vendors continue to deliver differented products and new approaches to solving problems which then creates new things to argue about. Even if consensus is restored, different choices are being made across corporate boundaries and then mergers and acquisitions take place throwing the whole organization into disarray again. The introduction of SOA and the underlying sets of implementation technologies was an attempt to see if there are some common principles, patterns, and specifications upon which the various stakeholders could agree to which would allow for the dust to settle a bit faster every time some kind of change occurred.

We are at War

- Enterprise Architects and Operations people typically don’t like each other

- Why?

o Differing approaches to the same problems

§ EAs – want to work on new technologies to solve existing problems

§ Operations – demands stability in the environment so that things can be automated

§ These approaches are at odds with one another.

One glimmer of hope in the War

While the SOA adoption trend has largely been led by Enteprise Architects, the Operations folks have been leading their own trend; ITIL adoption. ITIL v3 is largely service-centric and while the service catalog established as part of ITIL adoption is a superset of all services that IT offers (some of which may be based on SOA-based services or processes orchestrated via SOA), the motivation, language and underlying approaches that each of these groups are now adopting might have them spending a little more time at the water cooler together...

Can HP end the war by helping align the approaches through SOA and ITIL?

Isn’t this worthy of an IT Peace Prize? Or perhaps an "IT Peace Prize" is something that HP should sponsor?

Couldn't stop thinking about yesterday's email: Web Services does not a SOA make...

kellyemo — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:14:00 GMT

Yesterday, I received an email from a company doing a survey that stated the following:

“We are now collecting input for our upcomingWeb Sevices Development Survey. The deadline to provide your information is Friday July 11th, 2008.

The Web Services Survey examines the usage and future expectations of developers working with and/or creating Web Services applications. Also known as Services Oriented Architecture, many engineering professionals think that Web Services is the computing platform of the future and will revolutionize the way applications interact.”

I had to stop and think, did I just read that?.......

It seems there is still a lot of learning needed to realize that Service Oriented Architecture does not equal Web Services. IMO this thinking can lead an IT organization into a great deal of trouble as it fails to take into account the “A” of SOA. SOA is about planning and building out an architectural foundation for agility and re-use.

Embracing a SOA approach can have a major payoff in IT agility but it requires planning and creating a foundation for service visibility (how can a distributed organization find services they need instead of creating service duplication?), trust (services are single points of value or failure and must be trustworthy) and control (SOA introduces new dependencies, faster rate of change and more requirements on operations).

Finally, SOA does not dictate a particular technology. Anything exposed as a consume-able, trusted, shared service can be considered part of SOA: Web Services and REST services and EJB services and….you get my point.

Equating Web Services to SOA is like equating aluminum siding to a house, it can be a useful component but it won’t put a roof over your head.

Recent SOA best practice gems from HP SOA Customers – or more than lost wages comes from attending HP Software Universe in Las Vegas

kellyemo — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 21:34:00 GMT

I drew the lucky straw to be a track manager at HP Software Universe. This meant I was tagged to organize all the sessions at HP Software Universe for our SOA track . The positive side of the administrivia was that in the process, I had the opportunity to review and hear some great presentations from our SOA customers who are making the journey towards effective SOA transformation. Here are some of the quips and gems that stood out for me: 1. One customer mentioned how for their organization, SOA is a tool within an Enterprise Architecture: The key message here is that you never do SOA for “SOA’s sake”. It’s a tool to help you achieve an architectural objective: agility, re-use, efficiency.

If you want to dig into this topic more, there is some interesting writing about SOA and EA here

2. One needs clear SOA transformation metrics to measure success: What is your SOA measured against? For one key customer, the clear metrics are 1) standards conformance and 2) business agility. Business agility is defined as the ability to see new business intentions, realize business changes and make improvements quickly.

To hear more about measureable benefits of SOA check out Tim Hall’s podcast

3. Don’t be surprised that one of the largest adoption hurdles is that SOA is fraught with “charge back challenges” -- In order for a group to adopt SOA it must be cheaper for the potential service consumer than to do it themselves. (This should be obvious) 4. How to manage versions effectively in a SOA? A best practice is to establish a time-based contract between service consumer and provider – allows the service provider to get consumers onto new versions, otherwise they will never move. 5. My favorite -- How to entice project teams to adopt SOA? Show them how SOA will grow their kingdom and make them a bigger king – appeal to ego, create a buzz – the more groups that use the service, the more successful the service provider, or the bigger the "kingdom". 6. Sometimes silos are not a dirty word. One customer started building out SOA in silos and is now connecting them when the organization has matured enough to handle it – the goal, build initial focused success, gain people buy-in, then expand scope 7. And since there are two sides to every story, that said, some silos must be broken from the get-go. For example, to have success in attaining SOA quality testing that works—you must have collaboration between development and QA – services change continuously during design, requirements definition, development and testing and dev and QA must have a dynamic feedback loop to get a positive result. 8. Finally a good quote ”you need SOA governance but it can’t be bureaucratic” Governance should make SOA easier not put up roadblocks. As the cliché goes..for many of these customers the carrot is proving more effective than the stick.