| 11/ 6/07 | ||
Web 2.0 and governance: not an oxymoron? |
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At the surface, combining Web 2.0 and governance sounds like a complete oxymoron – after all, aren’t mashups, wikis, and all that other hot 2.0 technology about rapid application development being placed in the hands of the end user? What does the G-word have to do with that? But wait, haven’t we been here before? All those quick-and-dirty VB and Excel-based apps of the past and present living in the nooks and crannies of your enterprise, and the joy of fielding service calls coming into IT complaining that an app, which you know nothing about, stopped working because someone in IT made a change to a data view or API or … that you had no idea was being used by a department you never heard of! Web 2.0 has the potential to repeat this nightmare, with your SOA initiative becoming the hostage. Dion Hinchcliffe’s recent blog on the top ten challenges facing enterprise mashups raises this issue quite coherently, stating “If enterprise mashups unleash hundreds of new applications inside an organization, then who will catalog them, support them, maintain them, and fix them when they break?” Fighting Web 2.0 technologies is definitely not the right answer – as Joe McKendrick points out, they will happen in your enterprise (and involve your SOA) whether you like it or not, so you’d better get in front of them. And the best way to do this is to bring these business-oriented mashup developers into the big tent of SOA, encouraging them to participate in the process of defining and prioritizing needed services, and to register their use of services so that IT knows who to contact when rev 2 (or 3, or …) of those services needs to be deployed and prior versions retired. In other words, governance. But Web 2.0 governance needs to be lightweight and seamless to mashup developers or they’ll simply work around it, and they also need to gain more than they lose from participating. A well-designed development-time services repository/registry with integrated governance and an easy-to-use front end to find interesting services will do exactly that. It’s the catnip that will help you herd those Web 2.0 cats, or at least keep track of their general whereabouts. |
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| 06/ 8/07 | ||
SOA in Israel -- At the Knee of the Adoption Curve |
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I just returned from a week in Israel working with LogicLibrary's distribution partner, SRL Group. I was impressed with the energy and activity of the Israeli IT community, especially with regards to its interest in and understanding of the value of SOA. I spent time with a wide variety of large enterprises -- banks, insurance companies, defense contractors, software vendors, and government agencies -- and the conversations that took place exhibited a strong grasp of the need for design-time SOA governance. Issues such as how to effectively communicate available services to application developers, how to establish traceability from consumers to consumed services, how to establish effective technical and business architecture/standards governance, and how to deal with the complexity of impact analysis as services within an SOA mature and are versioned were common themes throughout these conversations. Many organizations have completed technical SOA pilots and have deployed an initial set of production-quality services, and they are now grappling with the issues of scaling their SOA initiatives to the broader enterprise. I believe that Israel is on the cusp of an explosion of broad-scale SOA activity, similar to where the U.S. was about a year ago. If the interactions I had this week are an accurate indicator, Israel will soon have numerous examples of successful SOA adoption with strong governance in place -- I'm looking forward to returning six months or a year from now to see these examples in action. |
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| 03/13/07 | ||
Beware the Suite Siren Song |
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Joe McKendrick's recent post hit the nail right on the head -- we have now entered the phase of marketing hype in the SOA world where the more the merrier, at least as far as the big vendors are concerned (after all, there's more to sell that way). I especially like Jim Kobelius' quote "Isn’t this notion of a SOA suite from a single vendor getting us back into the monolithic days of yore?" I guess flexibility is in the eye of the beholder... The SOA space still has plenty of shaking out to do before we can consider it to be old hat technology. Given the current state, openness and integrateability ought to be high on your list of requirements -- who knows what surprises lurk down the road as SOA tooling and runtimes continue to mature. Don't rush down the suite path, you may regret it. |
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| 01/22/07 | ||
Replacing "Inflexible Inefficiency" with "Flexible Inefficiency" |
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I spoke at a federal government sponsored SOA governance workshop last week, and at this workshop an interesting side discussion arose around working within government bureaucracy that I think has bearing in the commercial world as well. One of the core issues with SOA adoption within large bureaucracies is that the incumbent decision-making and funding process is not tuned for the flexible needs of SOA. While this "inflexible inefficiency" is a particular challenge in government settings, it also applies to large commercial organizations. An approach that has worked within at least one government organization is to establish small-scale joint initiatives funded partially by participants with a common interest and need, combined with seed money from a "change agent" focused on improving organizational flexibility. While this approach doesn't necessarily align with a strategic SOA initiative, it can be quite effective in seeding initial SOA successes into the organization. In effect, this approach replaces "inflexible inefficiency" with "flexible inefficiency" -- creating momentum from the bottom up with a set of tightly focused services that can be shared in an ad-hoc manner with other organizations. While the services that are produced from such efforts aren't necessarily the be all and end all to the broader organization, they are clearly valuable to the immediate initiative and they can be useful for other areas of the organization as well. As these services are picked up by other areas, interest in SOA increases and the opportunity can arise to begin addressing the organizational impediments to broader and more strategic SOA adoption. If you are struggling with organizational process impediments to getting your SOA initiative started, consider an approach like this that can "fly under the radar" -- find some seed money and a group of motivated participants to quickly build out a proof point of the value of SOA. You can then use this success in your internal marketing efforts within the broader organization. |
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| 11/20/06 | ||
SOA Governance Granularity |
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Are you excited yet? I'm sure the title of this post has you chomping at the bit... Seriously, now that the industry seems to have figured out that there is a difference between design-time and runtime governance, we now need to start looking at the different levels of governance (or governance granularity) within the design-time perspective. As I have been discussing this topic with our customers and prospects, I have come to the conculsion that three levels of design-time governance should be taken into account by organizations pushing forward with SOA:
Most people don't think of SDLC best practices as governance but in fact it is a great example of fine-grained governance within IT. When defined properly, SDLC governance serves as a natural feeder to the "mid-level" architecture governance that is typically established at key SDLC checkpoints (e.g., requirements complete, design complete, preproduction). This architectural governance in turn ensures that IT projects stay connected to the objectives of their stakeholders as established by the portfolio governance activities of initiative and project prioritization (which presumably connect back to core business needs). Portfolio and SDLC governance have been around for quite some time, and a number of tools (APM and PPM tools at the portfolio governance level, and the traditional SCM, requirements management, defect tracking, etc. tools at the SDLC governance level) exist to support these governance activities. What SOA brings to the table because of its loosely coupled nature is the increased importance of architecture governance -- it's back to service spaghetti if organizations don't effectively apply architectural governance over their service production and consumption activities. SOA also should force behavioral change at the portfolio governance level -- breaking away at least partially from application-centric initiatives and recognizing the need to support and fund service production projects that span across applications. This hurdle can be a significant challenge for IT organizations used to funding and optimizing at the application level, but if those organizations don't make the leap to fairly evaluate and prioritize cross-application activities, they will never truly build out an SOA but rather they will build old siloed applications using new Web services technology. Jeff Schneider's November 11th post makes some similar points on this topic. He breaks up the governance world into portfolio governance, process governance and asset governance. I see process governance and asset governance as different facets of the architectural governance level, with asset governance activities also leaking down into SDLC governance. However you decide to slice it, though, you need to recognize that an SOA will not just build itself. Without governance SOA simply turns into ABOS -- A Bunch Of Services... |
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| 10/12/06 | ||
Reusable Services -- Are They Really "Too Hard" to Create? |
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We seem to have entered into the naysayer zone with respect to service reuse within an SOA. I guess it's to be expected, as being controversial is one of the best ways to get attention in this noisy world of ours. However, I have to strongly question whether you can consider something an SOA if at least some of the services deployed into that SOA are not reusable/reused. Otherwise, we are back to A Bunch Of Services (ABOS) -- yet another layer of technology that might be fun to work on but doesn't really provide the expected business value. I'm not alone in this view -- for those of you interested in some real world examples of reusable services, I suggest you take a look at Dave Chappell's recent post on the topic... |
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| 10/ 5/06 | ||
SIs and SOA -- A Good Thing (Mostly) |
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You know that a technology trend is "for real" when the major SIs build initiatives around that trend. Just looking back at the SI landscape over the past few months here's a small sampling of SOA-related announcements:
Of course, this list isn't meant to be comprehensive and I'm sure that I've left plenty of SI-related SOA activity out -- my point is that the technology services world is heavily focused on SOA as "the way forward". That is good news to those of us who have been living in the SOA world since its inception (maybe even all the way back to SOAP 1.1 in May of 2000 if you care to dig back into the archives that far). When SIs take a technology seriously, two really good things happen:
Of course, the downside of such attention being paid to a technology is that marketing games increasingly come into play at an even higher level, creating FUD and confusion in the marketplace. We have been living with this in the SOA world for some time now as the early technology providers have been sorting out their product positioning, partnerships, etc. -- with SIs entering the game the stakes become even higher. However, I believe the positive far outweighs the negative and I for one am happy to see this level of engagement by the major players. My company, LogicLibrary, is also happy to participate at this higher level within the SOA space -- in fact just yesterday we announced a reseller agreement with IBM Global Services. I'm sure there are some SOA purists out there bemoaning the fact that SOA is being taken over by the marketing giants. That is exactly the wrong attitude to take -- we should be overjoyed to see SOA become mainstream, while keeping an eye out for the overhype that will inevitably occur. |
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| 07/31/06 | ||
HP Makes Its Move |
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HP certainly made a splash with its announced acquisition of Mercury last week -- it will be very interesting to see if HP can successfully integrate Mercury without taking away Mercury's unique characteristics that helped to make it successful. As Gartner states, "this deal marks the merger of a solid brand (HP) with an aggressive marketer (Mercury)." Mercury's earlier acquisition of Systinet was clearly an example of two well-aligned organizations on the marketing front; will this marketing-savvy organization survive absorption into the HP universe? On the technology side, I expect that this acquisition will increase Mercury's product focus on IT management given the stated intent to prioritize integration with OpenView. While this certainly makes sense, it also seems likely that this increased runtime focus will reduce the ability to execute in the design-time world. Time will tell... |
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| 01/18/08 | ||
Enterprise Web 2.0 mainstream or downstream? |
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A recent Gartner, Inc research note 1 informs us that 1) the use of the term “Enterprise 2.0” (E2.0) is on the rise, 2) vendors are starting to package Web 2.0 concepts and technologies for mainstream corporate consumptions and 3) the cultural changes needed to exploit this wave of technology will be as challenging as the arrival of e-commerce. Examples of mainstream vendors packaging Web 2.0 capabilities into their products include Microsoft SharePoint that now includes features such as wikis, blogging and tagging as well as, IBM’s Lotus Connections which is focused on bringing together teams through collaboration. Lotus Connections enables users to create social bookmarks, tags and to build Web dashboards, blogs, and online communities and profiles, similar to those offered on Facebook or LinkedIn. As a CIO, CTO, Senior Developer, or Chief Architect….you may be asking, “is this really going on in my organization and should I care?” My answer is “yes and yes!” Inside the organization, E2.0 will enable the flexibility and adaptation of development group composition with the energy in process flows, from which mashups will meet business processes and service oriented architectures. Unfortunately, end users are sometimes too impatient to wait for IT and their planning processes and initiate the end results on their own. The key to harnessing E2.0 is “governance.” As Dion Hinchcliffe points out in his 12 Predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2008 2, “next generation governance will be demanded by IT to manage the proliferation of new SOA, E2.0, and mashups.” Governance is about setting the policies, procedures and processes that are needed for efficient and effective decision making throughout the business and IT organization. Solutions that offer SOA and E2.0 users boundaries, but not inhibitors to increased agility and innovation will go a long way to harnessing both SOA and E2.0….keeping both mainstream. So I propose you ask around your user community “what tools” they are using to share information and collaborate with co workers. I am certain you’ll be surprised by the range of answers you receive. You must determine if this is an opportunity, a threat to corporate IT, or both and is this something that should be governed? |
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| 11/13/07 | ||
WOW...Can You Believe that the Web 2.0 Craze Started From a Conference... |
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The concept of "Web 2.0" began with a conference brainstorming session between O'Reilly and MediaLive International. Out of that discussion came the concept that the web was more significant than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity. Strangely, could it be that the “dot-com collapse” marked some kind of turning point for the web, that a call to action such as "Web 2.0" might make sense? Undoubtedly it has, in the 3.5 years since, the term "Web 2.0" has clearly taken hold, with more than 10.5 million citations in Google. Yet…as with all phenomenon, there is still confusion over Web 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0 and mashups. Let me attempt to clear the water here: |
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