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Archives for October 2009

Technical Debt Management: Pay the Interest or Pay down the Principal?

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Let’s face it, Enterprise Architects and CIOs don’t always see eye-to-eye.  In my experience, the most common point of contention is “get it right” versus “get it done”.  And of course, this is never an academic conversation, it’s typically a hasty phone call, email or conversation trigged by a “new finding” at a “crucial moment” for a “critical project”. 

At the risk of over generalizing, in these “emergencies”, the deciding factors are time, short-term cost, security risk and short-term technical risk (availability, reliability).  So, if bypassing the architecture gains time, but creates a security or short-term technical risk, then no bypass is granted.  But, if these risks aren’t a factor, well, “get it done”. 

The problem, of course, is that most bypasses are never revisited, and accumulate as expensive, high risk, Technical Debt.  Even worse, most organizations don’t recognize the existence of, nor manage, that technical debt. 

So, how do you raise awareness about mounting technical debt, without being labeled “technology purist”?  Use the inherent “debt metaphor” to build your case in business terms.  Start with a point from Martin Fowler’s recent Technical Debt Quadrant Bliki entry:  “The decision of paying the interest versus paying down the principal…”

The interest is the recurring cost of maintaining a subpar solution that is outside the architecture.  The principal is the subpar solution itself.  Principal is paid down by investing resources to remediate the subpar solution.

Organizations with existing technical debt, need to add technical debt management practices to periodically review the costs and risks of continuing interest payments, versus the costs, risks and opportunities of paying down the principal. 

And for those organizations staring down a “new finding” at a “crucial moment” for a “critical project”, add technical debt to your decision making.  Can you afford to incur additional technical debt?  If so, for how long?

“Pay the interest, pay down the principal, manage your credit line.”  That sounds like a good conversation starter to me…

SOA Consortium Declares Mission Success, Announces Future Plans

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  Today, the SOA Consortium declared success on its advocacy mission to help the Global 1000, major government agencies and mid-market business successfully adopt SOA by 2010.  The SOA Consortium’s declaration is supported by recent industry research, the high value case studies submitted to its case study contest, and industry momentum around business and technology strategies that are dependent upon a SOA foundation.

From today’s press release:

“When the SOA Consortium began, SOA was more of a fringe methodology that only a few organizations were doing with any great success, rather than an accepted part of an overall business strategy. Three years later, we see corporations large and small using the principles of SOA to enhance their overall business and technology strategies,” said Richard Mark Soley, executive director, SOA Consortium. “As we move forward in the drive towards Business Ecology, the combined BPM/SOA Consortium will continue to engage with the business community to show how SOA can be a valuable part of their business optimization efforts.”

According to Gartner Vice President and Distinguished Analyst W. Roy Schulte, “the term ‘SOA’ was coined by Gartner, and Gartner published the first reports on it in 1996. However, widespread mainstream adoption only appeared after 2005. SOA is a durable change in application architecture, like the relational database and graphical user interface. It is the natural evolution of distributed computing — it is distributed computing done right. SOA is already the dominant architectural style for business applications. Virtually all CIOs are somewhere on the road to SOA, either starting or far along. SOA principles are timeless; no replacement is in sight.”

In a recent conversation with Joe McKendrick, Forrester’s Randy Heffner spoke of SOA adoption levels that match the SOA Consortium’s goal of 75% adoption rates by the Global 1000 by 2010.

“By the end of this year, 75% of the global 2000, that’s folks with 20,000 or more employees, say that they’ll be using SOA,” Randy continues. “When we asked, ‘Are you satisfied?’ roughly 25% says that SOA has provided most or all of the benefits that they expected. There’s another 30 to 40% that said, ‘It’s provided less than we expected, but still enough benefit that we’re expanding our use of SOA.’” 

Interestingly, in that conversation, Heffner pointed out the greatest success comes from business-driven SOA approaches, exactly what the SOA Consortium has been advocating from the onset.

“What do the 25% moving full force into SOA have in common? “They’re treating SOA as a business-design concept,” Randy says. “That sets a whole different perspective on how you view the kinds of services that you’re building, the methods that you put around it.””

In addition to declaring victory, the SOA Consortium announced its future plans to merge with OMG’s BPM Consortium:

“The SOA Consortium will be continuing its advocacy efforts as part of the new BPM/SOA Consortium, which also ties in with the Business Ecology™ Initiative. The Business Ecology Initiative is focused on erasing the constraining lines between business and Information Technology (IT) so that IT becomes a ubiquitous, integral and vital asset to the company and leads decision-making, structural change and enterprise-wide quality initiatives, drives efficiency and revenue, and provides measurable, clear return on investment.”

SOA Consortium Activities and Transition

Timing:  The merger between the SOA and BPM Consortiums will be completed by 2009 year end.  The first event of the merged BPM/SOA Consortium is the BPM and SOA in the Clouds Symposium, to be held December 8-9, 2009, in Long Beach, CA.  Organizations and individuals interested in participating in that program should refer to this open call for participation.

Working Groups:  With the completion of the 2009 SOA Consortium | CIO magazine case study contest, the Executive Suite SOA working group has completed its charter. 

SOA Community of Practice is working on an “Everyday SOA” paper that describes the key concepts in our services, portfolios, management units and IT landscape diagram.  The group intends to deliver the paper in December 2009.

The Enterprise Architecture in the 2010s working group is working on a discussion oriented position paper on how a formalized business architecture contributes to Business and IT success.  

SOA Consortium Publications:  All SOA Consortium publications (papers, podcasts, presentations, blog posts) will remain available to the public at their current locations.  This includes the forthcoming working group papers.

Consortium Leadership: The joint BPM / SOA Consortium will be managed by Karen Larkowski, current program director of the BPM Consortium and General Manager of the Business Ecology Initiative.

Thank You!

On a personal note, I’d like to thank everyone who has contributed to the success of the SOA Consortium.  This long list starts with our members and sponsors, and includes all invited speakers, executive summit and symposium attendees, our pundit friends (analysts, press, bloggers, thought leaders), the OMG team, and every SOA practitioner who raised the bar (and value) in his/her organization from SOA as “just a bunch of web services” (JBOWS) to SOA Means Business.

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

What are real people doing with SOA?

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I just posted this on SOA Consortium Insights. This is the final evolution of the SOA Drivers diagram I first posted here a year ago (more or less).

A frequent question to the SOA Consortium is “What are real people doing with SOA?”. Sure, folks see and appreciate the winning case studies. But, what about the “every organization”. What problems, or opportunities, are being resolved using a SOA approach? What’s the best place to start? Top-down from business strategy? Bottoms-up from IT projects? Somewhere in the middle?

This is best answered in three parts, starting by level-setting on business-driven SOA.

By “business-driven SOA”, we mean three things:

1. Creating a portfolio of services that represent capabilities offered by, or required of, your organization. Those capabilities may represent business, information, or technology concepts.

2. Composing, or orchestrating, those services along with events, rules and policies, into business processes and solutions that fulfill business scenarios.

3. Never proceed without a business outcome in mind. That “business outcome” could be cost and complexity reduction via a rationalized IT portfolio. In other words, “business-driven” doesn’t require a business person tapping you on the shoulder, it means executing for business reasons.

Next, our take on “SOA initiatives”, which is, there shouldn’t be any. Rather, there should only be business initiatives that (when appropriate) use a SOA approach. Sure, it sounds like semantic nit-picking, but in actuality it’s a lesson from the trenches. Focus on the business problem, not the SOA grand challenge.

As you know, business initiatives can arise from strategic decisions, business architecture/design decisions, and/or operational results. And since SOA can be applied to a variety of business situations, it only makes sense that SOA can appear at point, from strategy to operations. In other words, there is no best starting point, only the best starting point for you.

As these business initiatives are further refined in planning and execution, business and implementation details are surfaced, which also may call for a SOA approach. For example, Joint Business and IT Planning activities may surface common process, function and/or information needs, across projects. These are potential drivers for a SOA approach.

This business and IT activity continuum is expressed by the blue, green and yellow boxes, and grey arrows and boundaries, in the diagram below. While blue represents business activities, and yellow represents IT activities, we’ve learned that the most successful organizations spend their time in the green, where business and IT continuously collaborate.

Finally, the business scenarios. Referring to the diagram below, in each column of the continuum, we’ve listed real world SOA approach drivers. For example, strategic business initiatives that have benefited from a SOA approach include introducing new business capability, entering a new or adjacent market, integrating mergers and acquisitions, and introducing multi-channel strategies.

We captured these drivers during interactions with practitioners (real people) over the last three years. These interactions included our executive summit series, our community of practice discussions, invited speakers at our events, case study contest submissions, and the thousands of practitioners we’ve met via industry events, private forums, and in their conference rooms.

SOA Approach Drivers Diagram, October 2009 version [click on picture to enlarge]

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

Brenda M. Michelson

Brenda Michelson

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