No Spin Architecture : Services Oriented Architecture (SOA)

SOA at TD Bank - ArcCast

makif — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 22:21:00 GMT

About: This post provides a link to the interview I recorded with Tom Kerigan, Senior Architect at TD Bank about SOA at TD Bank

Greetings,

I interviewed some of the speakers at the spring session of the Financial Services Architect Forum, one of the interviews with a senior architect at TD Bank has been selected for an episode of Microsoft's global arcast you can listen to the arcast online or download it and play it on your favorite MP3 player. The interview can be found at

http://www.skyscrapr.net/blogs/arcasts/archive/2007/03/15/852.aspx

Best regards,

Mohammad

Interview: SOA - Beyond the hype and Secure Development Lifecycle

makif — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 05:27:00 GMT

About: This post is about the interview that I recorded for InfoQ

Hello,

You can find my interview on SOA, Interoperability and Secure development lifecyle at

http://www.infoq.com/interviews/Mohammad-Akif

Best regards,

Mohammad

Web Services Vendor Support Matrix

makif — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 22:20:00 GMT

About: This post is about the Web Services Standards adoption in the industry

Greetings,

I found this illustration about Web Services Standards adoption in the industry useful and thought of sharing it with all of you, please note that it is not updated to include all the standards supported by .NET 3.0 (e.g. WS-ReliableMessaging implemented by WCF, WS-MetaDataExchange implemented by WCS etc.), nevertheless, I hope you will find it useful (please note that all the usual disclaimers apply i.e. this is not an authoritative source on other vendors etc. and is not shared to denounce any SOA vendor etc. etc. & etc.). I plan to spend some time on the matrix early next year and post an updated version

Best regards,

Mohammad

Dr. James Gosling on Java, J2EE and SOA

makif — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 20:53:00 GMT

About: I was invited to attend the Java world wide developer conference, this posts discusses the key messages I heard at Dr. James Gosling’s keynote address.

Hello,

It is always a pleasure and privilege to listen to the creator of Java and EMACS in his trademark no-nonsense style. Dr. James Gosling, a graduate of University of Calgary, Canada, started his key note address at the world wide developer conference in Toronto with a Joke about the relationship between Calgary and Toronto. He then went on and described Java’s capabilities around platform independence and security. He joked about the perseverance of EMACS and expressed tongue-in-cheek embarrassment that it was used as a major development environment for almost 20 years, however, he noted that more and more developers are moving towards visual tools. He mentioned that the developer tools have evolved from their traditional Edit-Compile-Debug functionality to include features for learning, exploring and sharing.

Dr. Gosling also spent some time describing JDK 5.0 features and gave a glimpse of the next version of the JDK. He referred to the recent hype around Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services and expressed frustration at the lack of industry standard definition for SOA. In his opinion every one who talks about SOA has something different in mind; he mentioned that a key characteristic of the SOA is to prevent any leakage of implementation information to the service consumer.

Dr. Gosling described complexity as the evil twin of functionality and capability and mentioned that as an issue with J2EE which is going to be addressed through better developer tools. He also described the development process for standards.

One of his most interesting comments was around ‘HTML backlash’ where he talked about the industry realizing that HTML does not fulfill all requirements for a number of enterprise systems and although its not politically appropriate to say so in many organizations, desktop applications need to be developed and deployed to address business need . He ended the session with the usual throwing out of dukes to the crowd.

Best regards,

Mohammad

Selling SOA to business stakeholders

makif — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 05:25:00 GMT

About: This post discusses the challenges of selling services oriented architecture to business stakeholders

Hello,

So you are convinced that Services Oriented Architecture is the right approach for your IT organization, you are all set to transform your IT systems to SOA but before you move forward you need to sell ‘SOA’ to the business stakeholders. Offering advice about how to deal with business users is difficult as every organization has a unique set of dynamics, culture, relationships and history, however, there are certain concepts that are applicable to most organizations. Here are some of the ideas to consider in your quest to sell the virtues of SOA to business stakeholders.

Translating the benefits of SOA

Resist the urge to sell ‘SOA’ as a concept to the business stakeholders; you need to translate the benefits of services in to consequences that are important for the business. Please note that some of the benefits listed below may also be realized without implementing SOA as aspects of SOA are an evolution of good OO principles, however, SOA facilitates in realizing these benefits. Some of the many benefits of SOA include

1) Business agility

Services oriented architecture results in systems that are loosely coupled allowing IT to respond faster to the directives of business stakeholders. SOA allows for a more natural depiction of the business processes, real life events and system boundaries in software, improving the ability to respond to changes in the business. In addition, closer modeling of reality allows for relevant and actionable business data and loose coupling between services reduces the ripple effect of changes.

2) Better service and quality

SOA can improve the business stakeholders’ ability to provide better services to their users in a number of ways. A major advantage of SOA is significantly reduced cost and complexity for integration of disparate system, this reduction in costs and complexity can mean better, faster and cheaper alignment with more partners. In addition, reducing the number of point to point solutions and silos improves the overall quality of the systems.

3) Best of breed solutions

SOA improves the ability of the business and IT management to choose the right solution to serve business needs as it is easier to integrate these solutions with the existing infrastructure. For example, using a services oriented architecture based approach, it is much more possible and easier for J2EE and .NET systems to co-exist and interact with each other.

4) Reuse and Standardization

I have mixed feelings about including reuse and standardization as a business benefit. SOA allows for systems based on open industry standards and creation of reusable IT assets. However, at the end of the day that argument works better for IT management than the business community as they are much more concerned about providing the right services to their user base than the systems’ potential for reuse. If you are going to use the ‘reuse’ argument, talk about it in terms of how it fits in one of the three buckets business users really care about, these buckets are “Faster, Better and Cheaper”, reuse and all your other arguments about SOA need to fit in to one or more of these three buckets.

5) Evolution vs. Revolution

Business users are suffering from IT revolution fatigue; SOA is not a revolutionary idea, however, the advances in technology and cooperation amongst IT vendors have made it much easier to implement now. In many ways it is a natural evolution of the object oriented architecture and design.

Big Bang vs. Crawl-Walk-Run

Some organizations have taken a big bang approach where a massive multi million dollar effort is announced and undertaken to implement SOA whereas others have designated SOA for new development, specific projects and adopt SOA in a more gradual manner. In my experience organizations that have implemented a combination of the two have been most successful. Due to the variables involved, it is a good idea to have a long term strategy that has measurable success criteria in the short and medium term, avoids detailed long range planning and where the first SOA enabled solution that the IT organization implements is NOT a large and complex system. Remember, the reality is always different from the hype and irrespective of how many seminars you attend and articles (and blog posts) you read, experience remains the most effective teacher.

Proof of concept

One of the best things you can do to sell SOA to business stakeholders is to implement a proof of concept even before you go in front of the big bosses. It is important to choose the right POC that can help you make a case for a larger investment from business users. Do not choose a POC that is extremely hard to explain, has no front-end impact and takes six months to realize. Something that is tangible, measurable in terms of ROI and can be done in about six to eight weeks can be a good learning experience for the IT organization and be a great marketing tool.

Industry Trend

Business stakeholders care a lot about what their partners and competitors are doing, make sure you have your data and statistics. For example, a leading IT research & analysis company is going to release the results of a survey shortly that shows a dramatic increase in SOA implementations at large enterprises in the past year. Having data and studies that show that your organization is not the first and the only one to implement SOA would be extremely useful.

Vision and Roadmap

Nothing worries business stakeholders more than an IT presentation that does not seem to be well-thought and does not consider future. It is a good idea to present a vision for SOA and a roadmap that shows how you plan to get to the vision by completing quantifiable milestones.

I wish you the best of luck in your presentation, remember some of the usual presentation techniques apply to this meeting as well, knowing your audience is critical, knowing what matters to them (rather than you) and enrolling key people in advance usually makes the difference. It is hard to oppose something that someone has had a chance to review and provide input before you presented to the larger group.

In the next two weeks I will be writing about some of the negative consequences of implementing SOA and some of the organizational changes that are required to realize the benefits of SOA

Best regards,

Mohammad