Introducing Denny Boynton: Software Coroner

john.mullinax — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 02:17:19 GMT

Following a Burton Group analyst’s claim that “SOA is dead”, Denny autopsies SOA in this post, and assess the cause of death. In one section, called “Morbid Obesity”, Denny talks about how (prior to joining Microsoft) he worked on a nice, useful little project that exploded as execs jumped on the SOA bandwagon:

“Suddenly, we were trying to solve huge strategic problems with SOA. We were tasked with standardizing processes across several departments and business units. We were talking to dozens of people about services that would standardize key business capabilities in their part of the company. We were developing taxonomies, dictionaries and registries to manage an eventual service environment. We were talking about governance standards and protocols and trying to answer questions like, “How do you get services approved for enterprise use?” and “How do you submit your service for deployment into the enterprise infrastructure?” and “What is your SLA for the service and who owns it?” and “If that group owns the service, who owns the SLA for the underlying data?” And while we were doing all of this, we were not doing one very important thing: Designing and developing services.

“Fifteen thousand empty calories a day, and suddenly our initiative was obese and hypertensive.”

Sound just a little too familiar, anyone? ;)

Thanks to Hanu for pointing me to Denny’s post!

Technorati Tags: soa

Enterprise Mashups = Service Oriented Reporting?

john.mullinax — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 17:48:34 GMT

Josh Holmes posted here about the article on Enterprise Mashups he recently co-wrote with Larry Clarkin for Architecture Journal.

It's a good article, and he talks about presenting the paper at SAF (Strategic Architect Forum) recently, and the feedback that he and Larry received from attendees. A brief quote:

"Enablement and Governance were the two largest parts of the discussion. How do I safely allow more people to create mashups without compromising the IT department, the data and everything that we hold near and dear? The fear, that I think that we resolved, is that this is the Excel or Access database of this generation and that if we as the IT department don't have control over it that we will have the wild west and everyone will be working off of non-record data. The counter point is that if someone is creating a mashup with approved services, they are actually leveraging the authoritative data source rather than creating new rogue ones."

Sounds like a good discussion. Here's a little different angle for approaching this topic....

Reporting tools have been building a primitive form of mashups in the enterprise for a long time. The ad hoc reporting tools (e.g., Business Objects and even Excel) feel the most "mashup-y" to me, as you can put together any data sources that can be meaningfully related. On the other hand, structured reporting tools offer the "live" connection to data. If these capabilities came together in single tool to expose enterprise services along side the more traditional data sources like a BO universe or a relational data store, you'd be 90% of the way there to an enterprise mashup tool, wouldn't you? And if some of the services were external, then you'd be all the way there - or darn close, I think.

With all the attention SOA, service repositories, service composition, and service governance have gotten, it's interesting to me that something like enterprise mashups have not emerged under the name "service oriented reporting".

Maybe because mashups emerged first in the consumer world the reporting technology providers were not "tuned in" to this trend very early on? Or, perhaps this just shows the real genius of Popfly? That is, now that it's here as an example, enterprise mashups just seem like such an obviously good idea. Whatever the case, enterprise mashups by any name look to me like an innovation that reporting providers could capitalize on -- or be disrupted by.

Technorati tags: SOA, enterprise mashups, reporting, popfly

Beyond | IT : SOA

Introducing Denny Boynton: Software Coroner

Enterprise Mashups = Service Oriented Reporting?