Service Oriented Architecture - SOA

An in-depth interview with an SOA pioneer at Deutsche Bank who “kicked-off an expansive yet Agile methodology that is quickly moving the bank to a global service-orientation, with a minimum of fuss and pain.” From the Interview:

“At the end of the first quarter, we did something that’s not too common for Deutsche Bank, which is, we created some cross-bank governance structures for our SOA program. Most people will hear the word ‘governance’ and tune out. But this was a group making sure that a group of people across the bank were able to pick up the early work of the infrastructure, and expend that to training and communications for the flagship project to the service development. What we didn’t want to do is just turn all the activity onto SOA and create spaghetti; to let 1,000 flowers bloom into something that, in the end, doesn’t really add up to much. What the governance structures did was to build on the work we did on the infrastructure side, and advance it when it comes to things like naming standards. All of the engineering decisions that have to be made-which can make all the difference in how these things are used and operate. To extend that to communications, we had the same governance structure set up. We rolled these programs out to touch the development community in small groups. We made sure they were aware of what was going on, that we listened to the problems that were affecting them, and that we would determine what would make a difference for them.”

Link to Resource: John Stepper Brings SOA to Deutsche Bank

Source: John Stepper, Managing IT Director of Equity Derivatives & Equity Finance, Deutsche Bank via IDG Norway

SOA Governance Resource Guide Section: SOA Governance User Implementations and Success Stories

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Without any ads at all! Not even a trace of it!

Many people perceive value in something called Business-IT alignment, and argue that we should invest in tools and methods that increase this alignment.

Does the word “alignment” actually mean anything concrete, or is it just a vague metaphor, as I suggested in  my previous post Alignment – Science or Pseudoscience? Here’s my challenge to the alignment brigade: I’m not interested in “business-IT alignment” unless it can be expressed as a percentage.

Let’s imagine we can define a scale from 0% (no alignment whatsoever) to 100% (total alignment). I guess the two extremes would be practically impossible, but 80% would be significantly better than 40%. So we could suppose that any investment that increased alignment from 40% to 80% would be worth considering, if the costs and risks were acceptable.

But at present, we don’t have an agreed scale. People sometimes talk as if alignment was some metaphysical goal (like love), rather than a practical manageable outcome. But while I accept the importance of relationships and trust within organizations, I don’t see this as part of the concept of alignment.

And I’m not convinced that Business-IT alignment is necessarily a good thing anyway. As I said at a CBDI Forum meeting back in April 2000, 

“There are some organizations where business and IT are perfectly aligned: they are standing side by side, with their heads in the same sand, aligned in a shared sense of complacency. In other organizations, the opposite is true. It is often in the dynamic, progressive organizations where business and IT are furthest apart.” [CBDI Journal "Interact", May 2000]

Furthermore, why is “alignment” only a question for IT. @malcolmlowe comments “interesting how no-one measures business-finance alignment as %. It’s just part of bus”. And what about HR or other support functions?

However if we had a scale I believe it could be a useful management tool, provided that the results were properly interpreted. Given how many CIOs worry about the “alignment” problem, some of them might want to assess and benchmark the alignment percentage from time to time, to see if it is going up or down. As long as it is clearly understood that there are many things that IT needs to be “aligned” with, not just a simplistic notion of “the business”.

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Even through the tough economy, SOA continued to evolve this year, bolstered by interest in cloud computing. As frameworks and specifications like OSGi and Java EE 6 pushed for more componentized enterprise applications, the Java world itself shook when Oracle announced its intent to buy Sun Microsystems.

Here are some of this year’s more popular blog posts:

As Oracle swallows Sun, MySQL, NetBeans and Glassfish not in danger
Since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in April, much speculation has surfaced about the enterprise software giant’s commitment to MySQL, NetBeans and Glassfish. At Oracle Open World in October, CEO Larry Ellison tried to quell concerns on both fronts,  claiming each was critical to Oracle’s future.

What’s the future of XML?
The idea that it had data-centric, document-centric and program-centric uses was disarming. It was clear it was not a natural developer favorite, of course. It provided the impetus for Web services, SOA, RSS, bioinformatics and much more. But, like Pick or Fortran or other once-popular languages, it is conceivable that XML’s use will at some point decline.

Microsoft shares tips on Azure cloud development
Microsoft’s best and brightest design gurus dedicated nearly a whole day of discussion on Azure architecture at the company’s Patterns & Practices (P&P) 2009 Summit. In a P&P session about designing for Azure, Microsoft Technical Strategist Steve Marx had a number of tips for developers. One of the biggest initial decisions Azure users will have to make is how to handle storage.

MS Doloto tool said to speed large-scale Ajax applications
According to Microsoft’s Soma  Somasegar, the company released Doloto, a tool that analyzes Ajax application workloads and automatically performs code splitting of existing large web applications.  The tool comes out of Microsoft’s research labs.

Going Skyway: Using Eclipse, modeling and Spring MVC
Surprisingly, perhaps, modeling has been somewhat downplayed among application development teams pursuing JEE apps – that is probably even more true in Spring-style development. But modeling can be a means to help achieve well-formed, reusable services. Some call that ”SOA.”

Predictions of the collapse of service oriented architecture endeavors in the recent economic slump did not pan out — companies remained committed to moving forward with SOA. Now, with a recovery shaping up, SOA may play a key role in strengthening companies for the next growth phase. The challenge will be effectively governing the way SOA evolves.

At the recent SOA in Action
conference, I had the opportunity to join Miko Matsumura, vice president and deputy chief technology
officer for Software AG, and John Favazza, vice president of research and
development for WebLayers, Inc., in a scintillating and informative roundtable discussion about the role SOA plays in business growth, and how how effective governance can make this happen. (Listen to the audio Webcast here, or read the full transcript here.)

John Favazza said that there has been some moderation of SOA
efforts, but no one engaged in cutbacks of any kind over the past year.
“We’ve seen [customers] maybe slow down the projects they are working
on, so they push out their timetables,” he related.

Companies seemed to take two approaches to SOA during the economic
slowdown, he oberved.  “Some are locking things down and becoming more
tactical,” he said. “Then we have this other group of customers, a
smaller group, who actually used this downturn to focus on strategic
initiatives. Their plan was when the economy starts ticking back,
they’re going to be well prepared.”

Miko Matsumura said his company saw the same thing over the past year, and echoed the findings of Forrester analyst and SOA in Action keynote speaker
Randy Heffner, who observed that only one percent of companies in a Forrester survey indicated they were pulling back from SOA altogether. 

Miko also observed that merger and acquisition challenges, along with consolidation, have been driving a lot of SOA business cases over the past year. “We’re
seeing a lot of market consolidation, IT integration efforts
consolidation and removal of redundancies — what I would call size and
scale benefits,” he related. In turn, Miko reported seeing more investment in SOA strategies to help prepare for the next economic upswing. “We see people who are investing in expanding their capacities
and capabilities going forward.”

Miko also pointed out that as we enter a growth phase, governance will become critical as companies seek to apply SOA approaches to their siloed organizations and siloed technology infrastructures. “The thing that I think is really important from a growth perspective
is this notion of complex demand, as an organization grows to a
significant size,” he said. “They experience market fragmentation, they have to expand to new
customers, they have to start to verticalize, geographically localize,
and offer more niche versions of products and services.”

In turn, this leads to more complex consumption of IT
capabilities, he continued. “It means you have more channels. You have
more leverage. more reach. and more mass customization. You need capabilities
to serve a much larger number of potential customer silos, which is
part of the fragmentation that comes with the size of enterprise.”

This complexity will demand more service orientation, and more comprehensive governance of resulting services. John added that “as the economy grows, there’s going to be more pressure
on the IT organizations that are there today. We’re seeing a lot of
them become more distributed. The reason we think that governance
is so important is now there are teams all over the world, and
there are all these technologies. The governance needs to be automated
all these different groups to make sure the policy enforcement is
done more appropriately.”

(Listen to the audio Webcast here, or read the full transcript here.)

This year the IT industry proved SOA is not “dead,” as Ann Thomas Manes had alleged. A manifesto codified key implementation principals and the pundits started talking about SOA as the true way to approach cloud computing. And it became clear to many that the marriage of BPMN and BPEL is indeed suffering some growing pains.

Here are the rest of this year’s top 10 blog posts:

Taking the long view of SOA and cloud computing
The major problems with grid computing were that it was too complicated and of too narrow use. But, let’s be frank and earnest, its biggest problem was that the term ‘Grid’ was too rigid and inflexible. That problem of Grid computing has been easily solved. Its name was changed to ‘cloud computing,’ a light and airy term with flexible connotation. Of course, I am kidding; cloud will not solve all the problems of Grid just by the change of a name. The same was the case when object technology met SOA.

BPMN with BPEL, an ongoing debate
While many developers still debate which tools are optimal for modeling business processes, Bruce Silver made some strong points on why Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) does not make modeling with Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) simpler. He had seen a recent blog post by Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley claiming that BPMN2.0 with BPEL is simpler than the new BPMN execution language and wanted to set the record straight.

Tools add Web services to existing Java EE applications
“The big technical challenge with using Web services for integration today typically is that you have a number of applications that don’t support Web services,” says Mark Hansen, head of start-up Proxisoft, formerly known as AgileIT. Hansen created software that, once installed in a Java EE environment, allows you to point and click on classes and methods to create Web services.

Facebook APIs add Activity Streaming
RSS and Atom are among the most useful elements to emerge from the XML and Web services revolution that occurred over the last 10 years. RSS seemed a small part of XML initially, but has since become incredibly ubiquitous. Now, the world of syndication may be poised for another leap forward. A lot of the recent syndication activity has been Twitter-like – not exactly mission critical or enterprise-oriented.

New SOA Manifesto walks the middle road
A group of SOA experts released a SOA Manifesto on Oct. 23, which sets out in 106 words the principles they feel are most important to the popular integration strategy. While some may think of SOA as something like Enterprise Architecture, and others, agile development, the SOA manifesto walks a middle road. Several industry thought-leaders have signed the document, including Grady Booch, Toufic Boubez, Thomas Erl and – Ms. “SOA is dead” herself – Anne Thomas Manes.

@RSessions claims that “Simplification occurs when the IT partitions align with the business partitions”. But what does alignment mean?

Roger defines alignment as “a measure of how well two patterns overlay on top of each other”. But this definition only works between two patterns that already occupy the same space.

For example, I think I know what it means to say that the furniture is aligned with the walls of the room, because I can measure this fact with geometrical instruments (ruler, set square), but if someone says that the colour of the furniture is aligned with the sensibilities of the owner, I can only make sense of this as a vague metaphor rather than a precise measurable fact.

The fallacy of astrology does not lie in the detailed analysis of alignments between the planets and stars – which after all occupy the same astronomical space – but in the notion that the movements of the planets against the stars are somehow aligned with the patterns of human affairs on earth.

When people talk about business-IT alignment, I can only make sense of this as a metaphor. I am not aware of a robust and meaningful formalization that would permit both business and IT to occupy the same geometrical space, and I can’t see the point of inventing one.

All we need is a mapping between two patterns occupying different spaces. An alignment is a special kind of mapping within a fixed geometrical space. If we can’t define a fixed geometrical space, then I regard the concept of “alignment” is a misleading metaphor, introducing unnecessary complication. I prefer the general concept of mapping to the false metaphor of alignment.

@aleksb6 objects that my position is “true iff two patterns to map. reality is a M2M relationship, so ‘alignment’ is not a complication, it’s a necessity!” He continues “btw, isn’t mapping two patterns just another instance of point-to-point thinking? I thought we wanted to discourage that!”

If alignment doesn’t make sense between two things, I can’t see that it makes any more sense between three or more things. The desired outcome is a set of structure-preserving mappings between as many things as we need to coordinate. That doesn’t mean we can or should design each mapping separately. In all but the most trivial situations, however skilfully we decompose a large problem into subproblems, there is always some coordination (juggling) left to do.

Here’s the bottom line. If assertions about business-IT alignment are to mean anything at all, then you have to have a way of looking at a lump of business and a lump of IT and say whether they are aligned or not, and if so how much.

Of course, if you believe you have a modelling language that can express both business and IT, then you might think all you have to do to find out if business and IT are aligned is to compare two models. But this turns out to a circular procedure, because the modelling languages are themselves justified by the claim that they promote business-IT alignment, so we cannot use the modelling languages themselves to prove that business-IT alignment has been achieved. There has to be some point of reference outside the modelling languages.

People keep telling me “alignment” is important, but they can only define it as a woolly and subjective metaphor. So if we stop worrying about “alignment”, and talk instead about the various multi-dimensional mappings between a complex system of systems and a complex set of business requirements, we can concentrate on what is objectively important.

And leave the concept of “alignment” for the astrologers. All together now …

When the Moon is in the 7th house and Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars.

How closely are SOA governance and project management coming together? Should the enterprise’s Project Management Office (PMO) get involved in governing SOA and enterprise architecture in general? Is SOA governance essentially a project to be managed like others? Are there other enterprise players that also are taking an active interest in SOA governance?

At the recent SOA in Action
conference, I had the opportunity to join Miko Matsumura, vice president and deputy chief technology
officer for Software AG, and John Favazza, vice president of research and
development for WebLayers, Inc., in an in-depth roundtable discussion
about the requirements behind SOA governance, and how this should be led. (Listen to the audio Webcast here, or read the full transcript here.)

Miko Matsumura, for one, said he is “seeing some amazing alliances” between the PMO and enterprise architects in
the sense that “PMO is sort of the approval choke point of all
projects. That is actually now starting to potentially open up to EA
with respect to this notion to getting architectural review.”

This adds even more teeth to SOA governance as well, he added. “You have
to answer to EA and PMO together.”

Another party that is increasingly weighing in on SOA governance decisions is the procurement department, Miko continued. “Procurement is
stepping up and saying, ‘you’re going to buy what to do what?’”  The procurement department also has teeth in the equation, since “ultimately at the end of the day the enterprise
is going to have to pay the bill, especially when it comes to non-interoperable
solutions that come from really scattered dispersed vendors.”

John Favazza also is seeing more project management methodologies enter the SOA governance equation as well. “I do see that as eventually a lot of these project management tools and
capabilities will merge with a lot of these governance
technologies.”

(Listen to the audio Webcast here, or read the full transcript here.)