Hope is not an Architecture : SOA

Adelaide Bank - Enterprise Architecture and Motion

nilsv — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 00:48:00 GMT

We were fortunate enough to have Glenn Smyth, Chief Architect of Adelaide Bank present at the Canberra Architect Council last week.

Many folks that have been around the traps in Canberra for a number of years will know Glenn from his days at ATO and also DEWR. He is a great presenter and a colourful character.

I think Glenn did a great job of describing the Enterprise Architecture Framework that he is champoining at the bank. He decribed the approach to capability modelling that is being used to ensure that the services being built are the "right services", something which is often challenging in SOA.

The capability modelling work is drawn from much of the work that has come out of Microsoft for the last number of years. Formerly known as Motion and now officially named MSBA, Microsoft Business Architecture (I gotta admit I like the name "Motion" better).

You can find a copy of Glenns slides here which includes some notes and references (approx 3 Mb in size).

SOA Workshop for Architects - Webcast series

nilsv — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 02:42:32 GMT

Webcast series that discusses SOA and the Microsoft platform pieces that can make SOA real. Great to see that User Experience is seen as a important enabler of a successful SOA strategy.

SOA Workshop for Architects: Messaging & Communications

SOA Workshop for Architects: Business Process & Workflow

SOA Workshop for Architects: Tools & Modeling

SOA Workshop for Architects: User Experience

SOA Workshop for Architects: SOA Overview

SOA Workshop for Architects: Federated Data

SOA Workshop for Architects: Identity and Access

SOA Workshop for Architects: Governance and Management

"SOA seems to have come and gone quicker than a $50 hooker"

nilsv — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 10:30:42 GMT

Murls wrote an interesting comment on my last post about Dr. Don Fergusons presentation at the last architect council.

Murls writes " .... To me it seems like I have seen so much come and go over the years and SOA seems to have come and gone faster than a $50 hooker. And my belief is confirmed through a set of slides that are just as relevant as the hooker. Here is an interesting thought...

(Q) what is the difference between the human body and the IT Industry?
(A) We know whats going on inside the human body. And we didnt create it!

Not sure if I'm intimate enough with the subject matter to comment on the $50 hooker analogy ;->

Certainly I agree, as would anyone who has been in the (IT) industry for some time, that we have seen our fair share of fads … waves of supposed innovation that have washed away without fulfilling the early promises. I too, am starting to tire of everything being “SOA” but there is still some interesting stuff going on, some of which Don outlined in his talk (along with the visual cues from his slides). i.e. I thought his talk was more engaging than just his slides :-)

One of the interesting topics he talked to folks about was some early work going on at BizTalk Labs. This includes some discussion on the Internet Service Bus (okay I can do without that name too).

The aim of the project is to offer some of the services of a services bus (connection between end points, publish-subscribe) on the internet as a software service. The channel 9 video on the topic describes a scenario of an IRC chat program where clients can subscribe to an IRC channel (the IRC chat scenario starts at about 10 minutes into the video). A second scenario based on a Wall Street trading app (at about 16 minutes into the video) aims to highlight de-coupling the end points and connect via the service bus.

Early days, but the potential for this is interesting to contemplate and something that would have seemed some way off 5 or more years ago. We have come along way with web services et al (and some service orientation techniques).

Back to the question that Murls asked us to consider ..... I think the question and answer could be:

(Q) what is the difference between the human body and the IT industry?
(A) We don't know what's going on inside the IT firewall of most complex organisations and we did create it! Is SOA an attempt to help us simplify and understand some of this complexity?

Canberra Architect Council - Dr. Don Ferguson

nilsv — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 13:40:21 GMT

Last week we were fortunate to have Dr. Don Ferguson in Australia.

Don is a Microsoft Technical fellow and fairly new to Microsoft after many years at big blue.

During this time he visited Canberra and presented at the Canberra Architect Council and shared some interesting thoughts on SOA, ESBs, Web Services and Web 2.0.

Don was also the keynote speaker at the Australian Architect Forum that was held in Sydney and Melbourne.

You can find a copy of Don's Slides here (approx 5.5 Mb in size).

Building Composite Applications using ..... what?

nilsv — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 06:33:38 GMT

Wikipedia defines composite applications as "... a perspective of software engineering that defines an application built by combining multiple services. A composite application consists of functionality drawn from several different sources ..."

What the composite "container" might be could, vary from a portal approach, to a richer smart client perhaps built in WinForms or perhaps Java client technology.

What many folks don't know is that Office 2007 makes a great platform (yes I said PLATFORM!) that provides rich services for composition of presentation, logic and data.

There is now a book available about composite applications and how they can be developed using the 2007 Microsoft Office System. This is a good reference that provides an overview of the technologies available in the 2007 Microsoft Office System, and gives several examples from various industries of how to build Office Business Applications.

Check it out at http://msdn2.Microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb220803.aspx

Comm Bank Case Study published

nilsv — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 07:21:26 GMT

Just returned from annual leave and in catching up, I see that the CommSee case study has been published on MSDN!

This is a meaty, 63 page technical case study that examines the solution architecture, technical project details, and best practices employed to get CommSee successfully rolled out to 30,000 users.

Great to see a case study that goes to some depth!

A couple of months back I posted links to other CommSee interviews and resources that may be of interest.

Informa SOA conference

nilsv — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 02:19:08 GMT

Last week I attended the Informa Service Oriented Architecture. In addition to presenting, I also had the pleasure of chairing the second day of the conference which basically involved introducing the day, keeping the other speakers to the scheduled time and most interesting was moderating the panel discussion.

The thing I liked most about this conference was the broad representation and speakers that attended. In contrast to some other conferences run by analysts organisations (or vendors!), the speakers and content seemed more realistic about actual SOA progress and maturity within organisations.

Some of the speakers included architects from Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, IOOF, St. George, QBE, ANZ, Accenture and Suncorp.

Was also good to catch up with Jim Webber from Thoughtworks and Kevin Francis from Infosys who also presented.

I presented on the second day on "Working through the issues of SOA implementation". The slide deck can be found here (note 5.8 Mb file). This presentation was pretty much based on Ron Jacobs content of Patterns and Anti-patterns of SOA.

SOA for Real! Comm Bank video interviews and resources

nilsv — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 04:43:00 GMT

You might have seen some talk of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) CommSee project. Its a highly successful SOA implementation with many interesting aspects (incremental delivery approach, Service design, .NET Smart client, large scale project, mainframe integration, user centric etc etc).

It's been featured in quite a few articles such as CIO Insight and of course my colleagues Nigel and Anna blogged about the User experience side of CommSee.

Now there is an MSDN page dedicated to CommSee where you can find a series of video interviews with the CommSee team discussing the operational and architecture aspects of the CommSee project as well as some case studies.

Some great stuff here on SOA in the real world.

SOA and the Reality of Reuse

nilsv — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 09:08:00 GMT

Their are many purported benefits of taking a service oriented approach to building systems and integrating with existing systems.

Some of these include:

Abstracted - services abstract us away from the underlying implementation
Relevant - functionality is presented at a granularity meaningful to the business
Enables a higher level of interoperability (abstracted and loose coupling)
Reuse - a lower cost in reuse at a higher level of granularity

Hold on. Reuse ...Some folks are starting to challenge the blind faith that SOA = reuse. Reuse has been an allusive goal for some time in the object and component world. Why is reuse with services going to be any different?

David Chappell recently wrote an interesting article entitled SOA and the reality of Reuse that discusses this.

Worth checking out.

Ron Jacobs - Patterns and Anti-Patterns for Service Oriented Architectures

nilsv — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 14:49:00 GMT

Last Wednesday, 30th August we ran a Technical Architecure briefing at the Canberra Microsoft office.

Ron Jacobs from the Architecture Strategy Team based in Redmond did an excellent presentation on Patterns and Anti-Patterns for Service-Oriented Architectures.

You can find the slides from Ron's presentation here (warning: 11.3Mb)

If you weren't aware, Ron is the host of the Channel9 show ARCast which is really worth checking out. There are some great topics and interviews ranging from Software as a Service to High Performance computing and everything in between!

Ron has certainly been busy whilst downunder. The next day he was in Melbourne presenting to the Melbourne chapter of IASA