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]
