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Archives for July 2009

SOA Archives: The Evolution of SOA, from Integration to Business Scenario Development

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For this post, I’m reaching deep into my archives. In January 2005, I wrote a freelance piece published by the Patricia Seybold Group entitled The Evolution of SOA, from Integration to Business Scenario Development.

Recently, it occurred to me that with rampant SOA hype, artificial boundaries and premature obituaries behind us, we are now on track for what I described almost 5 years ago. Services and service-oriented techniques are the base for a new era of ‘mix and match’ business solution delivery. More specifically, the term I floated was “business scenario development”.

The report introduction:

“Service Oriented Evolution

Topping the list of must-have technology strategies in 2005-2006 is service-oriented architecture (SOA). Services and SOA are an important IT architectural strategy that will change how software is developed, used, and sold.

However, SOA is not new; leading companies have been employing services architectures for years to provide consistent multichannel experiences to their customers, to integrate with partners, and to reap IT efficiencies through reuse.

What is new is what you can do with SOA. We believe the current uses of SOA (integration, adding application functionality, building new service-oriented applications) are merely the first stages of the service-oriented evolution. In the longer term, SOA will be the springboard that propels IT organizations away from traditional application development toward delivering IT instantiations of business scenarios, or business scenario development.

In business scenario development, IT business solutions will be compositions of services, business events, and business processes matching the interactions of your business—with customers, partners, employees, and regulatory agencies—in the support of commerce, collaboration, and information exchange.

While the idea of business scenario development is intriguing, in order to get there, you need to start at the beginning. You need to establish solid service-oriented practices, a deep service catalog, and an extensible SOA environment.”

In the report, I share my SOA definitions, an early release of my service classification scheme, some truths about services and SOA, and some service catalog starter tips. However, the report’s central focus is the SOA evolution business scenarios.

Rather than excerpting the 15-page report, I’m once again focusing on the scenarios, via the report illustrations.

Keep in mind the illustration titles –- Now, Next, Future – reflect January 2005.

Using Services to Integrate (click on picture to enlarge)

Using Services to Add Functionality or Build New Applications (click on picture to enlarge)

Combining Services and Events (click on picture to enlarge)

[For more information on the Service and Event tie, see my Event Driven Architecture Overview]

Combining Services and Business Processes (click on picture to enlarge)

Combining Services, Events & Business Processes (click on picture to enlarge)

As the report wraps up, I offer two insights as relevant today as when I first published them in January 2005:

“As demonstrated by our examples, as your service catalog grows, so do the possibilities for your business.”

“It is easy to imagine how many of your business scenarios can be achieved by mixing and matching services, events, and business processes. It all starts with SOA—and so should you.”

Even though my term “business scenario development” never reached meme status, the underlying ideas are now at the forefront of IT delivery. Our focus is no longer domain scoped and bounded applications, but rather solutions that match business intent and support business interactions. The base for resolving these business scenarios is, and will continue to be, services and services architecture.

SOA Practitioner Podcasts: Measuring Value, Successful EA Program Ties, Lessons Learned

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The SOA Consortium just released four podcasts of practitioner panels held during Gartner’s Application Architecture, Development & Integration and Enterprise Architecture Summits.  The panels were recorded in June and December 2008, but don’t let that deter you from reading further or listening.  I found the information is still extremely relevant.  I even noted a few tips for the SOA Consortium’s service portfolio management discussion, including adding a metric for the lifetime value of a service.  Plus, it’s always interesting to hear about real world business examples, stumbling blocks and tips.

Here are the write-ups of the panels that I posted on SOA Consortium Insights:

SOA Consortium @ Gartner AADI, June 2008, User Panel:  Measuring the Value of SOA

In their opening statements, each of the panelists – Melvin Greer of Lockheed Martin, Todd Biske of Monsanto and Mike Kavis of Catalina Marketing – spoke of measuring SOA in business terms.  Examples included eliminating waste, increasing customer satisfaction, improving time to market, increasing business agility, increasing business capability precision and improving business accuracy.

Organizations map technology and delivery metrics to business metrics via “line of sight” practices.  Line of sight is achieved by mapping business capabilities to services, and then mapping those services to the business compositions in which they appear.

Organizations map technology metrics, and delivery, to the business metrics via “line of sight” practices, and mapping delivered services to business capabilities, and the business compositions in which they appear.

After their opening statements, the panelists engaged in conversation with each other, the audience, and moderators on a variety of topics, including establishing baseline metrics via service instrumentation, eliciting KPIs from the business and how to respond to downside metric surprises.

Throughout the discussion, the panelists provided anecdotes from their real-world SOA implementations, including, some dirty laundry.

To listen to this podcast, please go here.

SOA Consortium @ Gartner EA Summit, June 2008, User Panel: SOA and EA: Lessons Learned From the Trenches

In their opening statements, the panelists –Todd Biske of Monsanto, Marty Colburn of FINRA, Maja Tibbling of Con-way and John Williams of QBE the Americas – spoke of the driving forces for SOA and the role of Enterprise Architecture in realizing SOA.  The drivers ranged from IT economics – application and information rationalization, to business transformation.  In all cases, current IT practices and portfolios were impeding timely business change.

After their opening statements, the moderators grilled the panelists on a variety of topics, including reuse expectations and results, quantifying benefits, pitfalls and the difference between EA and SOA.

As the panel closed, each suggested a best practice from their experience.  These practices are: assign an owner to each service; establish weekly architecture and project group reviews to discuss service use, development and issues; develop a services framework and taxonomy from your business architecture; and measure and manage service reuse savings in real dollars.

To listen to this podcast, please go here.

SOA Consortium @ Gartner AADI, December 2008, User Panel: Measuring the Value of SOA

In their opening statements, the panelists – Aleks Buterman of Lincoln Financial Group, Kevin Forbes of Healthways, Mark Kyzko of US Department of Defense, and Michael Onders of National City Corporation – all spoke of business transformation concerns driving SOA and shared key metrics related to their efforts.  Like the drivers, the metrics were business focused, such as dollars saved, revenue growth enabled, cost avoidance, business accuracy, business efficiency, time to market and business agility.

A key to success mentioned by all panelists is business architecture, specifically business capability mapping.  Shifting the traditional business-IT conversation from application specific features and functions to common business capabilities accelerated business buy-in, increased business participation, and in one case, changed IT funding practices, resulting in lines of credit for shared business capabilities.

After the opening statements, the panelists engaged in conversation with each other, the audience, and moderators on a variety of topics, including how to measure business agility; the ties between data management, business visibility and SOA; and the heightened rigor in testing practices and environments to accommodate the complexity of a shared services environment.

To listen to this podcast, please go here.

SOA Consortium @ Gartner EA Summit, December 2008, User Panel: SOA and EA: Lessons Learned From the Trenches   

In the opening statements, the panelists –Todd Biske of Monsanto, Aleks Buterman of Lincoln Financial Group and Kanai Pathak of Schlumberger – spoke of the relationship between their EA and SOA practices, including how perceptions of “EA as an ivory tower practice” can impede SOA startup and acceptance.  Value delivery is the best way to overcome this cultural obstacle; “success is contagious”. 

After the opening remarks, the audience tapped into the knowledge and experience of the panelists on a variety of topics, including applying service-orientation to business process, information and integration issues; marketing a SOA program, measuring SOA value, governance, and achieving SOA maturity.

As the session closed, each panelist shared a lesson learned the hard way:

  • Don’t “deploy and forget” your services, assign an owner for long term care and feeding, and consumer relationship management. 
  • Don’t mire the business in complex business analysis artifacts.  Elicit information from the business, without bogging them down in unfamiliar, unwelcome, techniques and artifacts.
  • Don’t underestimate the impact of expedited software development on downstream testing and deployment activities.  Perform business process analysis on your SDLC and apply automation wherever possible.

To listen to this podcast, please go here.

 

[Disclosure: The SOA Consortium is a client of my firm, Elemental Links]

Cloud Watching: Scale does not guarantee Performance

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A great feature of cloud computing is elasticity.  If your application needs more horsepower, a compute cloud can dynamically assign more resources.  When the usage spike ends, the resources can be removed.  However, the ability to scale doesn’t guarantee your application will perform satisfactorily for the additional load.  This could be due to a variety of issues, some might be cloud related, such as the additional overhead of running in a virtual machine, but more likely, the application wasn’t built (architected, designed) for scale.  A database bound application won’t be magically fixed by adding more computing power. 

Of course, the challenge is that you typically don’t know if your application will perform at scale until it doesn’t.  Testing for peak loads, especially extreme loads, is difficult and expensive.    Well, today the folks at SOASTA announced a Performance Certification program to make performance testing, on the cloud and on-premise, more accessible.

How it works, from SOASTA’s Tom Lounibos:

“SOASTA Performance Certification is designed as a turnkey process, minimizing disruption by eliminating any unnecessary impact on the existing environment. SOASTA and its partners collaborate with companies to define common use cases and then simulate those scenarios in the most accurate way possible—by using the web to test the web.

There are a number of purpose built tools to analyze the performance characteristics of individual components of a web-based application, such as web page design, application design, database implementation, or network architecture. SOASTA’s Performance Certification leverages its Global CloudTest™ Platform to provide an affordable end-to-end analysis of a site’s performance as well as measure responsiveness at normal and peak usage levels. Certified sites receive a comprehensive report on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), with a focus on response times achieved at various user loads.

Certification confirms that the site has been tested at specific traffic volume levels (1K, 10K, 25K, 50K, or 100K users) and has been measured against KPIs such as response time and error rates. In addition, as part of the certification process SOASTA and its partners provide valuable analysis of site latency to help companies improve the overall performance and responsiveness of their website.”

Who is involved:

“Supporting SOASTA in this performance certification initiative are industry leaders in cloud computing including platform vendors, testing companies and independent cloud service providers. They include 3Tera, Appistry, Chegg.com, Enomaly, GoGrid, Hexaware Technologies, Intuit, JackBe, PowerTest, Rackspace, RightScale, rPath and Zephyr.”

I think performance certification is an important piece to the cloud assurance puzzle.  Plus, the former retailer in me sees this as a good addition to peak-planning activities.

 

[Disclosure: SOASTA has been a client of my firm, Elemental Links].

Community Insights: Services, Business Solutions, Portfolios & Management Units

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[Cross posted from SOA Consortium Insights]

Over the last few months, members of the SOA Consortium’s Community of Practice have been discussing concerns, practices, tips and gaps related to creating and maintaining a vibrant service portfolio. Discussion topics have included service investment, definition, reuse, rationalization, payback, governance, marketing, operations and asset management.

In recent weeks, these discussions have converged on the concepts of “management units” and “portfolio management”. From our working notes:

“Taking a service-oriented approach fundamentally changes IT’s basic management unit from an application, to services, or a bundle of services that represent a business capability (component, segment, flow or function), and can be applied to many applications, business processes and/or domains.

This unit shift ultimately forces changes to funding, project management and asset management practices. Most notably, organizations will need to be deliberate in the realm of product portfolio management, understanding the business capabilities offered in the portfolio, how those capabilities are instantiated via software and information assets, and how/where those capabilities are packaged into products (applications, processes) that solve a business need.”

This week, I distilled our on-going conversation into the diagram below. [Click on diagram to enlarge]

As you can see, and probably expect, the diagram spans business architecture, IT planning, IT delivery, IT operations, and service portfolio management concerns.

The arrowed lines show the connections between concerns. For example “Business solutions provide business capabilities” and “Business solutions consume services”.

The purpose of this post is two-fold. First, we want to share our in-flight work, particularly the diagram, in case it can be helpful as you enter into service management discusses across your organization.

Second, we have some questions that we’d love the broader community’s feedback on.

1. Has your organization’s management perspective shifted away from business solutions (applications, business process implementations) to business capabilities/functions? If so, in which areas: IT funding, IT delivery, IT operations, and/or IT product management?

2. Are you engaging in service portfolio management practices, such as service value prediction and assessment, marketing, sourcing, rationalization, refresh, and retirement? If so, what techniques and/or tools are you employing?

For example, to manage service sprawl that began from federated service development and was compounded by a merger, one of our members is considering marketplace techniques, both real and predictive, to let developers choose which of a redundant set of services survives, rendering the less popular obsolete.

3. Who manages the service portfolio? How does this compare, contrast with the management of the business solution and IT asset portfolios?

Given the convergence of SOA and Cloud Computing, I did a quick extension to include consuming cloud services. The extensions are in yellow. [Click on diagram to enlarge]

Obviously, an externally sourced cloud service is not an IT asset. However, since the cloud service does instantiate business capability, it is a member of your service portfolio. The question becomes which service portfolio management practices and policies apply to an externally sourced (and controlled) cloud service? I’ll be thinking that one over myself, and would love to hear your thoughts.

Please share any thoughts on the post, and/or our direct questions, via comment, blog post, or discussion forum. Just link to this post, we’ll find you.

[Disclosure: The SOA Consortium is a client of my firm, Elemental Links]

What are your ‘Rings of Defense’?

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I’d like to attribute this recent ‘catching up on my reading’ to long sunny summer days in my Adirondack chair, but no such luck.  On the few rainless days, Zephyr has commandeered my chair.  Despite these obstacles, I’ve still managed to find time to read, and share some interesting articles.  Today, an article in June’s Fast Company caught my attention.  The article is entitled “Through the Fire” and shares strategies Cisco, Corning, IBM, Intel and Schwab are using to survive in the current economic crisis, and emerge even stronger as the economy rebounds.

Of the profiled companies and strategies, Corning’s Rings of Defense clicked with me.  I can see the connection to business architecture, the business of IT, and business IT alignment.  [As readers know, I prefer “business-IT integration”, but I’ll go with the crowd this once.]

Corning’s Rings of Defense (emphasis is mine)

“If anyone should be able to build a shatterproof fortress, it’s Corning. But during the telecom crash earlier this decade, the specialty glassmaker for everything from medical devices to consumer electronics to cars saw revenue nosedive from $7 billion to $3 billion in 18 months; Corning almost burned the village trying to save it. “We vowed never to let that happen again,” says president and COO Peter Volanakis. Corning’s executive team, the same senior managers as during its epic fall, instituted an early-detection system to identify signs of trouble as well as four “operational rings of defense” to help it manage through a crisis in a measured, strategic way.

The first step? A good offense. Corning created its own market-research system, relying not just on its customers but also on its customers’ customers, even checking stores to measure demand for the products it helps to create, such as LCD TVs. Corning also stockpiled cash, which enabled it to absorb a $400 million loss in the fourth quarter of 2008 without selling off part of its business, as it had to in 2002 to make a debt payment. And it helped that the company modeled worst-case scenarios and a response to each.

As trouble started brewing last year, Corning implemented its first ring of defense: discretionary spending cuts, reduced production, and hiring limits. As things got rapidly worse through the fall, management quickly implemented the second and third rings: shorter work weeks in Europe and Asia, limiting its use of contractors and temps, and, finally, layoffs. But as hard as it was to trim the staff by 13%, that was a far cry from the telecom crash, when it shed 21,000 of its 43,000 workers. This crisis feels more under control, the actions “more thoughtful,” Volanakis says.

Most important, Corning has avoided the last ring, which would include reducing its $630 million annual R&D spending. Its lifeblood is new products, such as those it’s aggressively pushing this year — scratch-free touch-screen glass for cell phones and laptops, smaller next-generation data centers, and a laser-light engine that turns a laptop into a projector. “We’re an R&D-based company,” Volanakis says. “R&D is the absolute last thing we’d cut.””

So, what stood out to me?  First, the use of scenario planning.  A long standing practice to envision the future and craft responses, which unfortunately many companies neglect to do when things are going well.  Clouded by ‘bubble fever’, perhaps.  From a recent WSJ Article:

“Use of scenario planning rose following the 2001 attacks, to about 70% of executives surveyed by consultants Bain & Co. in 2002, up from 30% in 1999. Since then, Bain’s surveys have found fewer executives using the tool, though the consulting firm expects heightened interest this year, because of the recession.

“It’s sort of like flood insurance,” says Michael Raynor, a corporate-strategy expert at Deloitte Consulting LLP. “Everybody runs out and buys flood insurance the year after the flood.””

The second thing, was the “rings of defense” concept.  The diligent and deliberate articulation of responses, in this case cuts, that provide short-term relief, while protecting the future, in Corning’s case, R&D.  Too often, in bad times, unilateral cuts are made, disregarding long-term implications.

So, my questions for you to consider:

1. Does your organization do scenario planning?  Is this purely a business activity?  Or does IT participate?  Is the practice extended to the business of IT?

2. Has your organization articulated rings of defense?  Is there general knowledge of what business activity should be in the center, protected by the last ring?

3. Has your IT organization articulated its rings of defense?  Do the IT rings, the activities and capabilities being protected, align with the business rings?  Or, do the IT rings subvert the business rings?

Brenda M. Michelson

Brenda Michelson

Technology Architect.

Trusted Advisor.

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