Application Architecture, Development & Integration

Dan Sholler’s session Initiating a SOA Effort (click link for slides) did a nice job of highlighting the basic things that lead a SOA initiative to be successful.  Many people first coming to SOA struggle to understand what this concept is really all about.  He started off with a nice simple list of the key principles of SOA:

1. Modular
2. Distributable
3. Swappable
4. Discoverable
5. Shareable

From there he highlighted that the primary benefits of SOA are agility and shareability.  To that at end, he made some very clear recommendations:

• Design the interaction layers of your applications according to the five SOA principles
• Focus on reducing dependencies between volatile implementations
• Share capabilities across system boundaries

Later in the presentation, Dan made a point I really liked: “services are agreements”.  In my view, understanding this is key to SOA success.  Thinking of a service as a piece of code that you throw over the wall to a production/operations group is totally missing the point.  Rather, we need to think of a service as a promise the service creation/delivery party makes to all of the parties consuming the service. 

Looking at advanced implementations, such as the work Amazon.com has done, leads to some interesting implications to application organizational structures and work processes.  The Amazon folks have clearly stated that the same team that builds a service is also responsible for running the service.  This team also figures out how the service should evolve, prioritizing new features and functions.  With only a small hop, skip, and jump, this conversation gets to development methodologies.  Personally, I think agile methods are another key consideration to keep in mind when thinking about how to go about doing SOA.  Check out David Norton’s sessions, particularly the one “How To Make Agile Waterfall“

• People question the “value of SOA” all the time.  Just as there being good and bad relationships between people in regular life, it turns out that there are a large number of both SOA Successes and SOA Horror Stories.  The key is taking the time on the “softer issues” such as SOA Governance and How to Organize for SOA.  It is also critical to hit the “value cynicism” head on by really nailing SOA Business Cases.
• Individuals in a relationship often need to work on being more mature in general.  Application organizations need to mature in general, not just specifically for SOA.  Make sure to check out the sessions on Application Governance and Maturity
• My favorite moment was when Sue mentioned that SOA had been around for quite some time and was still having issues – just like a boyfriend that had been hanging around for too long.  Roy made a great point about how SOA has significantly evolved from the early days of basic reuse and request/reply concepts.  On that note, check out the Delivering on Advanced SOA Track and particularly the sessions on Event Processing and Context Delivery Architectures.

As a final point, the notion that every IT organization’s journey with SOA is as unique, rewarding, and challenging as any serious relationship between people is a great thing to keep in mind.  There is tremendous value here, but we do all have to work on it.  We need to make sure we are focusing our time on the right things…every day – just as therapists are want to say!

I’m sitting in Jess Thompson’s SOA Technology Alternatives session (note: you can see the slides I mention below by following the preceding link).  He has done a nice job of putting a number of technologies into the overall context of what it takes for an SOA initiative to succeed.  All the technologies come together on slide 14, which contrasts these technologies across 10 major dimensions.  The most intriguing technical trend is clearly the expanding breadth of ESB Suites and how that will bump into BPM Suite evolution with appliances being an interesting alternative view of putting a number of things ‘in a box’.

He then goes on to highlight that lack of effective governance is the number one reason that SOA initiatives are perceived as failing.  This led to a discussion on a SOA Center of Excellence as well as the importance of managing your SOA Assets and Artifacts.  Personally, I believe these latter points are absolutely critical.  It’s all too easy to focus on the enabling technologies at the expense of focusing on the enabling management disciplines, skills, and behaviors that are required for SOA success.

To see more on these subjects, check out the following sessions:

• Selecting Backplane Infrastructure Technologies to Support Your SOA and BPM Initiatives
• Case Study: Transitioning to SOA
• Riding the SOA Tiger: Practical Governance for SOA
• SOA Horror Stories

Now that the Summit is upon us, we have the roster of case studies and user sessions finalized…and it’s an impressive one. Check it out:

-         Customer Keynote: A Platform for Strategic Execution – Transforming Your Business through SOA – Joe McCartin CIO & Mike Onders SVP, National City Corp

-         User Panel: Measuring the Value of SOA co-organized with the SOA Consortium featuring Lincoln Financial, National City Corp, Healthways, Department of Defense

-         Case Study: Event Driven Architecture at Bank of America – Managing Assets using RFID – Bill Conroy, Bank of America

-         Case Study: Transitioning to SOA – Transforming Chaos into Capability – Kevin Forbes, Healthways

-         Case study: Using Service-Oriented Application Composition To Reduce Development Costs and Improve Business Agility – Baz Khuti, Emerson Electric

-         Case Study Panel: SOA as an Legacy Application Extension Strategy featuring BlueCross BlueShield, LA Times, and Thomson Reuters

-         Case Study Panel: Mainframe Migrations – For Better or for Worse? Featuring FAA, Meritz Finance  and NYSE

In the last couple of days, I had meetings with 8 different federal and state government organizations.  As with commercial entities, many government IT groups struggle to get broad participation and true buy-in with respect to basic SOA concepts such as re-use.  Everyone is happy to pay lip service to the ‘goodness’ of sharing web services and leveraging capabilities across various parts of a government.  However, when push comes to shove, many hide in their bunkers and hope that SOA is another one of those things in the ’this too shall pass’ category, just like objects and earlier initiatives came and went.

Interestingly, I ran into three examples where breakthroughs occurred when SOA leaders looked beyond sharing within their government.  Instead, they looked at providing services to external constituents like businesses, consumers and other governments.  Suddenly, they ran into opportunities to actually charge a small amount of money for things like a service that allowed a new business hoping to get started to fill out a few common forms rather than dozens and dozens of forms.  This bit of funding and the notion of common cause that kept yet another government inefficiency story out of the papers, got several of the recalcitrant players to actually play ball!

With that in mind, I thought it would be appropriate to highlight the sessions that Benoit Lheureux is doing on B2B at the Summit:

• How to Modernize Your B2B Infrastructure
• Best Practices for Multi-Enterprise Computing
• Best Practices for B2B SOA

Yesterday’s post on mash-ups touched on one example of a ‘new era’ in application development.  This new era is categorized by several key shifts and new capabilities:

• Increasing uptake of agile methodologies by both development organizations and - more importantly – acceptance of (and engagement in) iterative methods by business people
• New development environments and technologies, increasingly leveraging the simplicity and speed of the web/Internet and social software
• Development organizations better understanding and embracing service-oriented development concepts
• Application leaders recognizing that the main challenge continues to be one of driving changes in behavior and culture
• A wide variety of non traditional developers suddenly having the ability to compose or orchestrate new, combinatorial capabilities out of a variety of existing applications/services
• Etc. (add in your own additional attributes of new era app dev)

Because we believe this new era of development represents both tremendous opportunity and a whole new minefield of risks, we have created an entire track of sessions focsed on Embracing New Era Application Development Practices.  Make sure to check out Thomas Murphy’s keynote for this track – The Future and Present of AD.

In my travels, I often run into two seemingly unrelated conversations that I view as two sides of the same coin.  There is one set of people that talk about how their existing systems, processes and people need to evolve – increasingly, these people are using the term “modernization”.  On the other hand are the people working on various aspects of SOA, Web/Internet, Agile Methododologies, SaaS, Cloud Computing, etc.  When I ask the first group what a ‘modern’ set of systems, processes and people/skills look like, they rattle off pretty much the same list as the second set of folks.

The big difference is that the second set of folks are often starting in newer areas – like their enterprise’s web sites – whereas, the modernization set of folks is starting with longer standing systems often built on things like mainframes, COBOL, etc.  The fact that people focused on modernization need to deal with the longer standing systems as part of getting to SOA, Web, Agile, Cloud, Saas – led us to create an entire track of sessions dedicated to modernization. 

Dale Vecchio is the lead analyst on modernization, which has been a significant research initiative for us for quite some time.  Make sure to check out Dale’s sessions on:

• When the Software Outlives the Developers: Market Forces Driving IT Modernization
• Can SOA Save Your Legacy Applications
• Analyst/User Roundtable: Legacy Modernization Through SOA
• Analyst/User Roundtable: Mainframe Migration – When and How to Do It?
• Case Study Panel: SOA as a Legacy Application Extension Strategy
• Case Study Panel: Mainframe Migrations – For Better or Worse

Open Source continues to increase as a force in the applications world.  Just as an example, it is fairly rare to find a development environment that doesn’t have eclipse present in some way.  Countless other Open Source projects have found their way into many of today’s homegrown and packaged applications.  Legal questions continue to be raised, which Mark Driver recently blogged about in Good Books On Open Source Legal Issues.  However,  Mark will cover two more important questions in the following sessions:

• The Role of Open Source in Modern SOAs
• When and How to Adopt Open Source Software (Analyst/User Roundtable)

I just read Nick Gall’s post WOA: Putting the Web Back in Web Services.  The whole notion of Web Oriented Architecture (WOA) is to leverage the basic web concepts from the Internet in SOA efforts.  Nick has provided excerpts of a great research note that lays out many of the fundamentals in this train of thought, including a basic definion and principles.  A great opportunity to hear about these concepts live and have them contrasted with other approaches to SOA is to attend The Great Debate: Should I Use Web Services or REST for My SOA?

One of the oldest adages about application success or failure is that it hinges on being closely aligned with the business.  Ironically, even though people have been saying this for decades, many organizations still fail at lining up closely with the business.  It seems that every new approach to applications gives us yet another chance to get this wrong – SOA is no different! (See Frank Kenney’s SOA Failure post)

I urge all of you to check out these two documents:

• Five Principles of SOA in Business and IT
• The Business Impact of SOA

You should also attend the Workshop on Business Alignment run by Andy Kyte and Susan Landry.  At the highest levels, business alignment implies that applications plans line up with business strategy.  Andy has a great take on this and the need for an application strategy in his session: If You Had an Application Strategy, What Would It Look Like?