Making Sense of SOA Blog - All Comments

re: Governance-- cure for what ails the modern application lifecycle or why does my IT head hurt?

Todd Biske — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 13:04:21 GMT

I agree with you Kelly, and tried to capture this in a past post on Service Lifecycle Management (www.biske.com/blog). A project lifecycle is linear. A product/service/application lifecycle should be circular, and trying to sync up the lifecycles of other services in the delivery of a solution is a big challenge. You can visualize it as a bunch of interconnected gears, and if one doesn't turn, the whole thing seizes up.

re: Governance-- cure for what ails the modern application lifecycle or why does my IT head hurt?

Brad Hipps — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:39:36 GMT

I'm with you except for the part about not thinking of application development in "linear" terms. To my mind the issue isn't a bias towards linearity. After all, everything is linear in the broadest sense: having a beginning, middle, and end. Whether I'm employing waterfall or agile development methods - whether I do all design, and then code, and then test, or do a little of each before proceeding to the next iteration - the procedure is linear.

However, if for "linear" I substitute "self-contained," then I'm with you. The problem you're describing, it seems, is that where once applications may have been parallel and untouching (as 'columns' or 'stovepipes'), they are now crosscut by 'rows' of services. 'Rows' is probably too neat; it's a crisscrossing of services every which way. And indeed the trick there becomes figure out where the touchpoints are, and what changes what... A headache is right. Remind me again why it's worth it?

re: Back to basics video-- think you need SOA but not sure where to start?

thirumurugan — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 19:00:01 GMT

it is good

re: Which came first, the chicken (SOA) or the egg (Governance) -- an initial foray into the concept of application governance

Charlie Bess — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 13:55:50 GMT

Governance in an enterprise SOA environment is quite different than traditional application portfolio management. All services essentially become enterprise services, since you don't necessarily know where or how they will be used once they are released into the wild. What do you see as the major changes that application governance processes need to embrace?

re: SOA: Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated

Mark Cathcart — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 05:00:09 GMT

I posted a trackback to your blog, since I'm not sure you support it, here is my observation in a nutshell. Next time someone asks you to try on the emperors new clothes, ask them to show you and emperor already wearing the clothes.

In other words, ask apart practical examples, concrete system, transaction numbers, database sizes etc.

re: SOA: Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated

kelly emo — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 22:37:37 GMT

Just adding a bit more to this discussion. I've seen two follow-on blogs that I think add a useful perspective on this discussion. In a blog at http://tinyurl.com/7zvttu by Doug Barry of the Cutter Consortium, he states "Now is not the time to for our industry to abandon the SOA acronym. It might be very well be the time to scale back expectations for a “massive shift in the way IT operates” and concentrate on some relatively short-term wins in your company to prove the technology". Doug makes the case that for many companies, having a transformational vision but achieving it with small, incremental steps may be the best route to success... similar to the comment in the blog above about thinking global and funding local. I agree with this and also doug's premise that it is highly disruptive to abandon the SOA term just because it has been associated with some IT failures.. if this is our tendancy, there would be no computing terms left.

I also want to call attention to Dana Gardner's recent blog called "Predicting vitality of ‘SOA’ completely misses the point — legacy IT is dead" at: blogs.zdnet.com/Gardner. In this blog, Dana makes the statement: "While the software market gnashes its teeth over how alive service oriented architecture (SOA) is, the much more important opportunity — and perhaps unique in the history of IT — is being overlooked.

There’s never better a better time to kill off your legacy IT systems. The next two years presents the architects and strategists of enterprise IT an unprecedented and probably not to be repeated chance to re-factor the way they do business. " This is a key reflection as well. Instead of spending time debating the merits of an acronym, the energy is better spent on strategies for achieving the change that is sorely needed in many IT organizations... the ability to break the rigid, point-to-point architectures (or accidental architectures of sorts) of the past and actually build a foundation for agile yet governed service oriented IT architectures, infrastructures and processes that can adapt to the change requirements of the 21st century.

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

rebecca — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:20:19 GMT

A splendid idea. I think we should start peace talks in a neutral zone, say, Iceland. And name the initiative "the litiaos peace talks"

Why Iceland? plenty of sunshine right now, plenty of hydropower (green), Bjork, and what the heck i've never been there.

re: Mixing Concept and Implementation

Charlie Bess — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 21:51:45 GMT

Although I agree with much your post,from a technological perspective. You can't loose sight that the reason all this technology is being deployed is to add business value to the organization. It doesn't have to be as pretty as we'd like it to be but it must always add value.

You mention that the business is giving IT less to work with, that is not always true. One thing that is true is that more of the IT budget is being consumed KTLO, and organizations that do not address that problem will have a significantly harder time with their business cases than those that are proactive.

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

Noam Tamarkin — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:26:51 GMT

Hi,

People tend to forget that there is the content side of SOA.

It is important to design your message to be clear for the consumer.

itgumbo.com/.../what_do_you_really_expose_as_a.php