Bottom-up SOA is harmful and should be discouraged

Bottom-up SOA - Another Great Read

Insane World — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 20:34:24 GMT

Bottom-up SOA - Another Great Read

re: Bottom-up SOA is harmful and should be discouraged

Jack van Hoof — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 21:52:36 GMT

Great article, Nick.

Sometimes there is nothing to choose. In some (or many) organizations you just have to deal with the chaos around and take the approach that is feasible. Characteristics of the environment may vary strongly from one case to another, even within one organization. These characteristics may put strong constraints on your approach, that vary from project to project. I think currently in most cases it comes to common sense, passion, charisma and craftsmanship to get the right things done. Getting the things rightly done is step 2.

http://soa-eda.blogspot.com/2007/06/there-is-no-one-size-fits-all-approach.html

re: Bottom-up SOA is harmful and should be discouraged

Evan — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 04:15:32 GMT

Yes, I agree 100%. Bottom-up doesn't work (I'm in that environment right now). In fact, your fictious scenario is unfolding right in front of my eyes. Integrating two systems by putting a third in the middle is anti-agile. Hopefully, I will be able to twist that proposal into something else.

I do think the middle-out approach needs some more attention though. I caught a good nugget of information at the bottom of a recent MS press release.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/10/04/HNmsesbsoa_1.html

"In the real world, the success stories we see are customers taking a pragmatic, middle-out approach," he said. "The only way to truly track to the needs of the business is to take small steps along the way. The mega projects are either big science projects that never get finished or they diverge from the needs of the business." [at the bottom]

re: Bottom-up SOA is harmful and should be discouraged

Jean-Jacques Dubray — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 15:05:00 GMT

Nick:

I hope your daughter feels better. I also have a 9 year old, and being French, I can't think of what it can be not having the money to take care of your child, because I don't know many children who do not require routine surgery or recurrent medication at some point, not to mention the monthly ear infection, and other snags in the early stage of life.

Back to your discusion, I am a bit puzzled about what you are saying. Usually people do SOA with focus such as:

a) BPM (automation & agility)

b) reuse (normalize business logic and data in IT)

c) integration (provide a more repeatable integration capability using modern technologies)

reuse is very bottom up for instance and can be very successful in eliminating redundant maintenance cost when business logic, data schema need to change

bpm is also kind of bottom-up as you may focus on one process at a time and not necessarily care or can create reusable services.

integration is also kind of bottom up in nature, you expose integration points in your system as you think they will be useful in the future.

Of course, having a bottom up approach without focus is not a good idea, it will get you no-where, but I am not sure having a top down approach will get you anywhere either. Your analysis might give you a bunch of very useful services but it doesn't tell you when you will need them in the next project. As a rule of thumb, people should avoid any big bang project.

My experience is that SOA is a discipline that you apply one project at a time and while you work on a particular project you try to leverage as much "long range" coherence as possible within your information system. You need visibility to establish this long range coherence, but I would not call that "top-down".

Cheers,

jdubray-at-gmail.com

re: Bottom-up SOA is harmful and should be discouraged

NickMalik — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 09:20:23 GMT

@JJ

Thank you for your kind words. My daughter is gradually improving, but it is day-by-day.

I'm not saying that "top down" is great. It is usually a mess. What I am saying is that bottom up is worse.

In your description, you describe a process where you choose to invest in improvement selectively, where the investment is needed and available. That is neither top down nor bottom up. That is simply the reality of IT. We don't (and really shouldn't) decide the business priorities.

However, when investment begins, you have to be ready, in the early planning process, with information about the services that are needed by the enterprise, and the ones that each major investment will provide. It requires real committment by IT management to build these things, and a real committment by the IT architects to build a SOA in the first place. (I do NOT have a common consensus even on that basic point).

Being ready is difficult. That requires planning before there is actually a project.

If you wait until the project begins, it is too late to build for the enterprise. Reuse of that kind is harmful, because you will end up with competing visions of the enterprise business object model. The cost of NOT planning for SOA is the cost of creating a complex EAI infrastructure where one would not be needed if you did some planning in advance.

So you do BPM where it is needed, and you do services where they are funded, but you don't do them blind and you don't expect that the cost of the project will pay for the work that the enterprise needs. It won't.

re: Bottom-up SOA is harmful and should be discouraged

Rohit Rai — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 06:38:38 GMT

SOA is about agile and expanding . . . To qoute Miko Matsumura (webMethods), "Think global, Act local"

Begin implemntating the SOA from a part, keeping the organisation in perspective and "building governance right into it" and "not wasting your time in governing it's implemntation" :)

SOA should start right of from the easiest/most difficult places, as per the companies perspective, so that we begin reaping on the benefits that it can offer at very early stages and also it alows it to get to the real world bottlenecks sooner than what you can in a design process.

re: Bottom-up SOA is harmful and should be discouraged

NickMalik — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 11:21:49 GMT

@RohitRai

What you describe is middle out, not bottom up.

By the way, I find it interesting that you give credit to Matsumura for the quote.

"Think Globally, Act Locally" is a motto that was commonly used about ten years ago in the US to encourage citizens to recycle and save energy. Applying it to SOA is not particularly quote-worthy.

re: Bottom-up SOA is harmful and should be discouraged

Rohit Rai — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 08:41:36 GMT

Hi! Nick,

First of all thanks, for putting me in tune with the "middle out" approach, I was wondering what that thing might be. Can you give me a few pointers to that, have been searching around the details?

I feel from this perspective, it is bottom up. Just keeping the ultimate goal in view and not wandering from it :)

"Think gloabally! Act Locally!",

Yes, it was the motto :)

But also Matsumura, did put it to use in context to SOA, and that is not a research by me, it's mentioned by Joe McKendrik, in his blog about this post :)

Check it here, http://blogs.zdnet.com/service-oriented/?p=912

And I do find it relevant in expressing the view of thinking about the organisational goal (global) while carrying on your work in small form (local). Correct, me if I am wrong. Am not as experienced as you poeple in the industry :)

re: Bottom-up SOA is harmful and should be discouraged

NickMalik — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 23:36:40 GMT

Thanks for the link, Rohit. I wasn't aware I was being so extensively quoted. I appreciate it.

I agree with nearly every word of Joe's blog. He is using the term Bottom-up differently than I am.

I'll blog this in a seperate post.

The BPM Elevator Speech

John Reynolds's Blog — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 06:06:32 GMT

A few years ago I posted a short blog entry " The SOA Elevator Speech " to try to distill SOA into talking points that you might be able to cover on one elevator ride. With that posting in mind, here's my attempt at explaining BPM as concisely as I can..