I’m in Chris Venable‘s session. Chris is a Senior Solution Architect at Walmart and runs in the #entarch crowd on Twitter. Chris promises me an architecture heavy, product light talk. Chris is lead architect on Walmart’s SOA competency center.
Opening the talk is a member of Walmart’s IBM partner team. The heart of the engagement with IBM was getting the SOA program off the ground. The CoC supports the enterprise on a progression to higher value, from process automation to process optimization. The CoC had to create a SOA framework that guided a rogue service development environment to an evolved SOA practice, focused on process optimization.
Working on establishing a business architecture, business view first. IBM offers component business model. Walmart had created their own business capability view. By understanding the business architecture, Walmart could focus attention on the highest value services.
Setting context, IBM is showing a Business Process Optimization (BPO) reference model. As Steve Mills spoke to this morning, the foundation is SOA.
Transitioning to the Walmart story, they used Goal Service Modeling of SOMA.
Chris is up now. His section is entitled Business Value Through Services: How service-orientation helps increase agility and reduce costs. Chris introduces the section as the traveling roadshow sales deck that he uses internally. That’s great. Marketing is a critical tool for architects.
Chris has been with Walmart for about 3 years. He is sharing some numbers on customers, transactions, stores. Needless to say, they are big. A Fortune 1 company.
Walmart is very successful. And renowned for IT. But, Chris shares not as modern as you might imagine. Chris points out that for the first 21 years, the biggest change was scale. With that scale, they reinvented logistics and supply chain processing. It was a very trial and error environment.
In 1983, the first real shift happened, Sam’s Club. Still retail, but a warehouse model. Sam’s was stood up as an independent channel (entity). Next, grocery and superstores. Again, managed independently. At this point complexity is growing. Then, an international move, which increased complexity.
Now, 15 markets globally (and counting) and a wide variety of retail operations. Yet, IT was operating as it had always done. As Chris points out, that’s not sustainable. Applications are bloated and brittle. This is the enemy of speed.
Needed to reorient thinking to fundamental building blocks of business rather than applications. Chris is showing a slide from Anne Thomas Manes, the collision course of Portfolio Bloat, IT Budget & Development.
Strategies enabled by SOA: Business Strategy (Increase Agility, Reduce Costs) and IT Strategy (Improve Usability, Improve Maintainability, Reduce Redundancy).
Cost reduction is a corporate philosophy at Walmart (lower prices). Cost savings doesn’t need to be sold. Agility though, was harder to understand. Chris is talking football now, Barry Sanders could move, change field direction, with quickness. Fast isn’t just about straight speed.
Chris has matched his internal marketing pitch to the CEO’s message on Growth, Leverage and Returns.
An example he is giving is “Site to Store”. All those capabilities existed at Walmart, but the orchestration is different. Without SOA, have to create a new application with redundant code. With SOA, becomes a new process orchestration. This fits the growth message: “quickly repurpose assets”.
After Chris wins support on the value, he drops into Applied SOA. How do we do this? That’s the section he is on with us now. ”Business results through services architecture”.
As building out SOA Framework, Chris knew they would struggle with Service Identification. That reorientation to business thinking from application thinking. To resolve this gap, Walmart brought in SOMA. They actually picked IBM because of SOMA, not the other way around (IBM, get SOMA).
At first, they tried to drop SOMA into a project-in-motion. That wasn’t successful. SOMA is pre-project. SOMA is about the business architecture, not software engineering.
Instead, they extracted SOMA out of the software process and brought it to business product managers. These are the folks looking out 2-years. Bringing SOMA to the product teams helped with SOA, and helped the product teams with their thinking.
Chris is showing SOMA materials. He is calling out the importance of Goal-Service Modeling and capturing KPIs and Metrics. In touching on challenges, he notes that people weren’t familiar with speaking about business goals and business rules. We talk broadly, in terms of business requirements. [Talk about the system, not the business]
Now, Chris is talking about SOMA and Product Roadmapping: Identification–>Specification–>Release Plans == Product Roadmap
The business product managers were able to benefit from applying SOMA concepts to business product roadmapping,
Chris “IBM calls it BPO, I call it bringing order to chaos”.
Me: I call it, real architecture.
Great story. Presented really well.
Five years ago, I published my Event-Driven Architecture Overview on the 
