Service Oriented Architecture - SOA

A couple of weeks ago, I asked a simple question on Twitter: Should Enterprise Architects have/get an MBA? That meme made its way to InfoQ, so I figured I should actually post my own thoughts on the subject.

First, a full disclaimer: I don’t have an MBA. I do have a MS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois (go Illini!). At the time I got my Master’s, a friend of mine took a different route and did a combined MCS (Master of Computer Science)/MBA degree. In retrospect, I wish I had taken that route. Part of my reasoning to not go that route was the whole MCS designation. Who has ever heard of that? Even from an institution like Illinois, would anyone have known what it is? For those of you wondering, it’s basically a course-only option for a Master’s degree. Getting an MS required writing a thesis. Getting an MCS did not. More importantly, however, I realize now that my interests lie more in the application of technology than in the technology itself. I had inklings of it back then, but at that time, it was far more important to be strong in technology first, rather than the domains in which it was applied.

Today, it’s a different story. There are no shortage of tech-savvy people in the business, so simply being a technology expert is not going to get you as far as it did 20 years ago. I’ve seen enough headlines that say IT departments are shrinking, meaning that some of the technology knowledge needed is being provided by people outside of IT. I don’t think this trend is going to reverse itself, so those of us that want to make a career in the application of technology will increasingly need more business-savvy.

So, should we all go back to school and get MBA’s? I view it as a tool in your toolbox. It is not a guarantee of success, but it is something that can make the path easier. Having long term career goals and a clear idea on what it will take to achieve them is probably far more important. Some companies may look highly on MBAs in making personnel decisions, others may not. Those are all factors to consider.

The other thing I wanted to comment on is the fact that many (IT) people lamented that EA isn’t part of the MBA program. I don’t agree with this at all. It’s a business degree, and like it or not, EA is still viewed as a technology discipline, not a business discipline. I do believe, however, that MBA programs should include some aspect of technology management. If an MBA prepares you to be a CEO, shouldn’t you have some idea on what your CIO and CTO should be doing?

As for me, getting an MBA is on my radar, but I haven’t yet made a decision on it. I definitely am reading more business strategy books, and for now, I think that’s the right approach for me, as frankly, I’m more concerned about paying for my kids’ education than financing continuing my own. But if I were in college today, given what I have learned about my interests in applying technology rather than building technology, I would definitely take that path, combined with a technology degree.

Jeff Scott recently posted a blog listing 14 challenges faced by business architects. They really apply to any enterprise architecture practice, and I wanted to call out and comment on a few of them.

Lack of business skills in the EA team. I commented directly on Jeff’s post on this one. I am sure there are many EA’s that have heard this statement, the problem is that it isn’t actionable. What specific skills or knowledge is missing? If you can’t get a straight answer on this, be wary of the protectionist culture that exists in many organizations. This is even expressed in another one of Jeff’s challenges, “Gatekeepers protect their business relationships.” We should all be focused on achieving the business goals, but frequently our actions are more geared toward protecting turf and climbing the corporate ladder. Someone who refuses to tell you how you can improve may be guilty of this practice, whether done with intent or simply because that’s the culture. This is why you must follow the words of another Forrester analyst, Gene Leganza, and answer the question, <a href="“What’s in it for me?” (Forrester subscription required).

An approach I like to use is to always emphasize that I’m here to help. I’m not here to be the police force and a bottleneck, I’m here to make our outcomes better. If they have people performing functions similar to enterprise architecture, but perhaps called something different, don’t turn it into a turf battle because you will lose, assuming the group is having success with it. They’re already performing the function, so unless you have a way to make that function better, there is no impetus for them to change. One thing I’ve done in those situations is to turn the conversation around and get them to start sharing their practices with other teams, and offer to be the facilitator of that communication. That can certainly play to the ego of any protectionist, but it can also be a great asset for you in demonstrating the value of the practice of architecture. Remember, it’s more important to establish the practice than it is to establish the team. Otherwise, you’re just falling into the same turf war culture that everyone else does.

Another challenge Jeff mentioned is a culture of change resistance. The scenario I described above was one where no change was needed, because the practice was being done with good results. If the results are not good, change is needed. Prior to any discussion on how to solve the problem, you have to get agreement that there is a need to change. If you get that agreement, now you can have a solid discussion. If someone doesn’t agree on the approach, ask to come up with an alternative, because you’ve already reached agreement that something needs to change.

Of the rest of the challenges, there are two others that I wanted to call out, you can review the rest on Jeff’s blog. They are: “Business units plan and work in silos” and “Tactical business focus.” These two strike at the heart of my previous post on defining the enterprise first. If the business hasn’t recognized that there are certain things that must be addressed at an enterprise level, then clearly anything with an enterprise scope will be a challenge. These are cultural issues that may be outside of EA’s ability to address, yet they are huge impediments to a successful practice. My experiences indicate that it will take someone at an executive leadership level to make this happen. They must be interacting with the directors of those silos and the common leadership above. You may be able to get some things done at a grass roots level because some individual managers may be open to shared planning, but it’s hard to turn that into systemic change without help from the top.

Thanks to Jeff for collecting these challenges, I hope others will contribute to actionable guidance that can help overcome them.

Lately, I have been working a lot in the cloud, not the puffy and white kind, but the virtual kind, and I have started to see that we are at major inflection point in the technology continuum.

As most of us in the technology field have heard about cloud (if not, then you must have been solo sailing around the world with no outside communication), the cloud is here to stay.

Most of the time when I speak about cloud in Asia, most people just don’t see how cloud is going to benefit them.

It’s a fair question to ask as most technical people have heard the hype that our industry spouts off about, without realizing the tangible results.

The best example I can give is to take you game console, with the graphics, memory and disk space and place it into a virtual computer. Then image that you have a persistent, reliable connection to the internet that is always on, like electricity.

Now image that the games you play are no longer reliant on the hardware of your gaming box. All the power is in the cloud.

In the future, when you want to play a new game, all you have to do is select and pay for the game. The game will be instantly made available. Want to see the latest graphics, no problem, the game is rendered in the cloud and displayed on your game console. No need to upgrade and for all intensive purpose, any device that has a “always-on”, reelable internet connection, will be able to show the game in all of it’s glory.

That is when the cloud becomes the device.

Stay tuned as in the next entry, I’ll dive into how governance is impacted by the cloud.

A couple of recent conversations have really caused this theme to spike in my head. In my experience, I’ve seen successful enterprise architecture and I’ve seen unsuccessful enterprise architecture. While many may put the blame on a failure to define what architecture is, I think that’s wrong. I think a recipe of failure is a lack of understanding of what the enterprise is. By that, I mean a lack of understanding of what capabilities should be managed at an enterprise level and what capabilities should not. There’s no uniform right or wrong approach, it is highly dependent on your company’s operating model as articulated in the book “Enterprise Architecture as Strategy.” In that book, the authors even state that at one extreme, a completely diversified company may have no enterprise architecture at all.

Once you understand what “enterprise” is, you have to set up the organization, processes, and governance to support that. To illustrate this point, however, let’s look at the differences today between two commonly “shared” organizations: HR and IT. Most big organizations have a centralized HR department. While I’ve never looked at the funding model for HR, my guess is that there is some overhead tacked onto every employee and every contractor that winds up paying the costs of the HR department. It’s a shared cost. One organization is normally not able to throw extra money in the pot and fund extra recruiters or benefits managers for their organization. Contrast this with IT where that’s exactly what happens. While IT may be centralized, it’s funding model is not. This results in IT organizations whose structure mirrors the business silos, and whose actions are completely controlled by the funding provided from each of those silos. What’s the point in having a central organization? That central organization really can’t dictate priorities or approaches, because someone else controls the purse strings. The right way of handling it is where the IT leader meets with the business leaders, they jointly agree on IT priorities and budget, and then the centralized IT department is funded based on those priorities with the discretion it needs to manage it from within. I’ve been at an organization that made that transition, and it was a definite improvement in the working environment, in my opinion.

Now the really interesting thing is getting that initial definition of the enterprise. The more I think about this, the more I realize that this definition is the job of Enterprise Architecture. We must architect the enterprise, meaning we come up with the proposal for what things should be enterprise and what things are best left to sub-domains. But wait, this sounds like a task, not a team. Initially, it is a task. Ongoing, however, the refinement of that definition and adjustment based on changes in the business and its climate will occur, and that is the job of the team. On top of that, there’s the enforcement aspect of making sure everyone continues to play by the rules. As an example, think about architecting the enterprise of the United States of America. The initial “architecture” creating the federated governing structure, with some capabilities provided at a federal, or enterprise, level (e.g. military forces) and others left to the discretion of the states. Since that time, the government has continued, in part, to tweak and refine what things are handled federally and what things are handled locally. The approach must always be monitored for effectiveness, responsiveness, cost, etc. Imagine, now, a different world where that structure doesn’t exist, and every cross-cutting topic is brought before a collection of state governors. Debate would occur on every single item, decisions would be extremely slow, and people with the power ($) to do so, simply would, even when it may not be in the best interest of the country as a whole. Take another scenario in recent press like immigration and border security. If the federal government says, “we must secure our borders” but doesn’t create a centralized approach for doing it, what happens? States with money may do a good job, states with others will not. One state’s approach may be completely different, making it difficult for legal immigrants to travel from state to state because the rules are so different. In other words, while all agreed that it was an enterprise goal, it was not managed as an enterprise capability. This is what happens in IT departments around the globe every single day.

My advice to my fellow EA practitioners: if you’re struggling, focus on defining the enterprise first getting buy off from senior executives on what items must be managed at an enterprise level, and then guide the transition to that approach.

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I read this report from GigaOM and it got me thinking about the challenges of trying to create a successful Facebook-like environment in the enterprise.

Challenge #1: Smaller community. Facebook has over 400 million active users. Your company will have thousands. You can assume that only a portion of those will be active contributors, and that within that smaller group, those people will be split into smaller communities of interest. This leads to a trickle of information flow, which isn’t going to keep people coming back. Even within Facebook, I wonder how many users are just playing games, versus having interactions with friends. The Facebook statistics page does not provide this information. This is important because…

Challenge #2: Enterprise apps do not exist as part of the social platform, and there will be a long migration for existing companies before that changes. If anything, the trend today is to put social networking features into the app, rather than building the app within a social networking platform. That’s not a surprise, as what platform would you choose?

Challenge #3: The browser dominates the deployment model. I try not to generalize my personal preferences, but if I am going to interact with something on a regular basis, it needs real estate on my desktop. That’s why I use Seesmic Desktop for Twitter/Facebook messaging. It’s always open. A browser takes up too much real estate, so eventually that page is out of sight, and out of mind. I think a push model is the only way to go to be successful.

Challenge #4: The enterprise does not have a culture of sharing. I don’t know the root cause of this, but in general, I have found that most enterprises only share information when it is required to get a task done. Rather than seeking out interested parties, information owners sit back and wait for information seekers to come to them. This results in a lot of wasted time and effort in finding out those information owners. In general, I think there are way too many barriers that prevent information sharing, whether due to corporate culture, legal and regulatory environments, internal politics, or many other reasons.

So what do we do? You’ll have to read my next post where I will try to ofer some suggestions for addressing each of these.

With the recent acquisition of AmberPoint, Oracle now offers an enhanced end-to-end SOA solution that features runtime governance, business transaction management, and cross-platform management capabilities. Put that solution to work and your business can achieve lower costs of implementation and higher profit.

Join Ed Horst, Vice President, Oracle (former CMO of AmberPoint), and Ashish Mohindroo, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Oracle, as they discuss in this live Webcast the customer advantages of the Oracle and AmberPoint combination.

• Learn how our SOA solutions with AmberPoint capabilities can help you:
• Achieve more agility and visibility into your business processes
• Increase control and performance of critical applications
• Improve performance and reduce IT costs to benefit your bottom line

Register for the Live Webcast

Event Date: Thursday, May 20, 2010
Time: 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET

As you might be aware, a few days back we released Patchset 2 (PS2) for several products in the Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Release 1 stack including WebLogic Server and SOA Suite. Though there was no patchset released for Oracle Service Registry (OSR) 11g, being an integral part of Fusion Middleware & SOA, OSR 11g R1 ( 11.1.1.2 ) is fully certified with this release. Below is some recommended reading before installing OSR 11g with the new PS2 :

OSR 11g R1 & SOA Suite 11g PS2 in a Shared WebLogic Domain
If you intend to deploy OSR 11g in the same domain as the SOA Suite 11g, the primary recommendation is to install OSR 11g in its own Managed Server within the same Weblogic Domain as the SOA Suite, as the following diagram depicts :

An important pre-requisite for this setup is to apply Patch 9499508, after installation. It basically replaces a registry library - wasp.jar - in the registry application deployed on your server, so as to enable co-deployment of OSR 11g & SOA Suite 11g in the same WLS Domain. The patch fixes a java.lang.LinkageError: loader constraint violation that appears in your OSR system log and is now available for download.

The second, equally important, pre-requisite is to modify the setDomainEnv.sh/.cmd file for your WebLogic Domain to conditionally set the CLASSPATH so that the oracle.soa.fabric.jar library is not included in it for the Managed Server(s) hosting OSR 11g.

Both these pre-requisites and other OSR 11g Topology Best Practices are covered in detail in the new Knowledge Base article Oracle Service Registry 11g Topology : Best Practices.

Architecting an OSR 11g High Availability Setup
Typically you would want to create a High Availability (HA) OSR 11g setup, especially on your production system. The following illustrates the recommended topology.

The article, Hands-on Guide to Creating an Oracle Service Registry 11g High-Availability Setup on Oracle WebLogic Server 11g on OTN provides step-by-step instructions for creating such an active-active HA setup of multiple OSR 11g nodes with a Load Balancer in an Oracle WebLogic Server cluster environment.

Additional Info
The OSR Home Page on OTN is the hub for OSR and is regularly updated with latest information, articles, white papers etc. For further reading, this FAQ answers some common questions on OSR.

The OSR Certification Matrix lists the Application Servers, Databases, Artifact Storage Tools, Web Browsers, IDEs, etc… that OSR 11g is certified against.

If you hit any problems during OSR 11g installation, design time or runtime, the first place to look into is the logs. To find more details about which logs to check when & where, take a look at Where to find Oracle Service Registry Logs?

Finally, if you have any questions or problems, there are various ways to reach us – on the SOA Governance forum on OTN, on the Community Forums or by contacting Oracle Support.

Yogesh Sontakke and Dave Berry

This article had an interesting interview with Tim Walters, an Information and Knowledge Management analyst with Forrester. In it, he emphasizes the role of Social Computing. He’s certainly not the first one to do this, but his comments caused me to think a little harder about this. I like Social Computing, and I have certainly been an active participant in the technology area via this blog and Twitter. I have also leveraged my web site, Facebook, and other resources for more personal community sharing. At the same time, i consider myself the exception rather than the norm. So, when analysts are talking about the need for companies to leverage social computing technologies more prominently, I wonder whether this is playing to a very small market segment.

If you are an information management company/content provider, how many of your customers want to participate in a community around your information/content, and how many just want to continue to be consumers? I think the tools have enabled people who wanted to participate all along to be able to do so, but have the tools converted people who otherwise would not have participated? I don’t know. What I have tended to see are a few people (like me) who love to be an active participant, a few people who love to comment/critique, but never offer original content of their own, and then the other 80% of the people who passively consume, if even at all. If we start forcing content into a more conversational, interactive setting, especially when that content needs to used for business purposes, are we going to make it more difficult to use for the 80% mass market?

The end result is that online communities and social computing technology, like anything else, must make business sense. They can’t be approached blindly. It can be a very powerful tool, but it can also be a very distracting one if it takes away from your core focus.

A recent conversation with a colleague delved into the complicated world of new technology decisions. At every organization I’ve been at, this has been a source of contention between four major groups: Enterprise Architects, Domain Architects, Development Teams, and Engineering Teams. I specifically listed Enterprise and Domain Architects separately, because I’ve seen contention between those two groups. It’s easy to come up with scenarios where each one of these teams should be involved, but it’s most problematic when one team tries to “own” the process.

Why does this struggle for ownership occur? Let’s start with a development team. First and foremost, they spend nearly all of their time on projects, which is where things get delivered. They are typically the ones closest to the immediate business need as represented by the project requirements, so they have fewer challenges getting justification or funding. They claim they need the new technology to deliver to the business, so they have a vested stake and want control over the decision.

An engineering team is also involved with projects, but has a challenge of remaining relevant when the project ends. The technology typically gets handed off to an operations team, and if the engineering team has built shared infrastructure, rather than one off infrastructure, there may not be much to do until the vendor releases the next version. Given that, it’s likely that the engineering team will expand into the world of technology architecture, but potentially only with the vendors they know, rather than a vendor-neutral architectural approach. This creates a risk of driving technology adoption based on new features rather than on company need, can create conflict with the technology architecture team, if one exists, and with other technology areas when the continued feature creep results in overlap with other domains. Unfortunately, engineering teams don’t have as much visibility into the business need, because that’s all funneled through projects and the development teams, so it sets the stage for tension between the development and engineering areas.

Now let’s throw in architecture. First, there can be conflicts within architecture teams, if there’s a separation and different reporting relationships for enterprise architects and portfolio/domain architects. Second, enterprise and domain architects can frequently be disconnected from both the “need” process of the projects and the technology delivery of the engineering team. Clearly, the right place for these roles to play is at the portfolio management level, where categorization, prioritization, and strategy takes place that results in the needs of individual projects. That doesn’t always happen though, and these roles often wind up having to get involved by mandate, becoming the gatekeeper or bottleneck that everyone tries to avoid.

As many have said, there are typically far more ways to mess something up than there are to do it correctly, and this is certainly one of them. Coming back to the idea of trusted advisor, my theory is that any approach that tries to mandate that technology introduction only come through one path is probably not going to work. Lots of people get great ideas, and guess what, not all of them come out of any particular role, and plenty of them come from outside of IT. (By the way, the same should hold true in reverse, IT can come up with plenty of good business ideas, just as the business can come up with good IT ideas.) The role of the architect is to be the trusted advisor and provide the appropriate context to make things successful. If someone has a great idea about a new technology, don’t stifle them because you didn’t come up with it, advise them on how to make it work based upon the context you have as an enterprise or domain architect, or advise them that it’s not going to be successful based upon that same context. That’s what an advisor does, and providing the appropriate guidance, whether it is what the other person wants to hear or not, is what will create trust. There will always be people that may be out of alignment with the business needs and priorities, if you don’t create alignment (either by adjusting the individuals view or adjusting your needs and priorities), you will be destined for frustration, splintering, and potential lack of success. Create alignment, and create an environment where appropriate ideas can thrive regardless of the source. That’s the role of the trusted advisor, and that’s a big part of what enterprise and domain architects should do.

All content written by and copyrighted by Todd Biske. If you are reading this on a site other than my “Outside the Box” blog, it’s probably being republished without my permission. Please consider reading it at the source.