Conference Summary Served with Spaghetti

I presented at a conference “Achieving Interoperability in Systems Architecture” on Wednesday. The occasional get together of architects, managers and developers is valuable. You can grab the odd new insight and find new approaches but it is also good to see others attacking problems in the same way and validating your own approaches.

After the conference I thought I would finish this summary on the aeroplane home. I have always wondered how to spend the time on long flights profitably and I admired a couple of passengers using laptops on my previous flight. Unfortunately as I try to use the laptop in flight I am in a middle seat with no elbow room on either side, and now I am served dinner in middle of the flight. I am juggling my laptop and the worst Spaghetti Bolognaise I have ever tasted. Still, here is the summary.

Josh Graham of Thoughtworks kept time well and came up with the comment “Why should I expect straight lines on my Business Process Model when business is inherently messy.” He also introduced one of our New Zealand guests as coming from the land of the “Wrong White Crowd” which sounds like a political comment and spoonerism wrapped up into one.

Mark Murphy of Tower Aust Ltd advocated we start small with SOA. He quoted IDC showing growth in SOA from $3.5bn in 2005 to $33bn estimated in 2010. Mark looked at some SOA definitions and aptly described the current situation where people build silo applications and then expect IT to join them together. He showed a couple of models from Sun and Microsoft showing SOA models that illustrated logical SOA.

Stephen Smith of Arcbok presented a simple framework for assessing the readiness of an organization for SOA. The framework consisted of assessing an organization on the dimensions of Leadership & Culture, Business, Technology, Knowledge, Funding and Sustainability. Each dimension has a number of questions to ask about an organization to asses its readiness. The sustainability dimension described whether the organization had the appropriate support, operations and governance in place for sustain the SOA. This also could include appropriate operational monitoring, measuring and standards. A readiness assessment tool is about risk management. Beware vendor maturity assessments that are used as tools to sell more services.

Krist Davood of AGL and Sensis has achieved something that everyone in the room envied. He had success justified SOA as an initiative using fairly hard-nosed accounting principles. He had justified SOA because of its ability to avoid periodic failures in the business because of the current way of doing things. He had been able cost these failures and justify the project to introduce SOA into the organization. SOA as a strategy to eliminate risk had been demonstrated to be effective.

Centrelink is a huge SOA operation and it was good to hear from Rob Doughty who is their Applications Architect. I liked his characterization of users as “Human Task Delegates” in relation to workflow applications. It was interesting for me to hear about the legacy system challenges that Centrelink have, but also how their portal work in benefiting other government departments. The focus of the talk was the deployment of a portal product which they will be basing all their systems on. I liked the comment that “Portals bring people and process together”. Rob talked about the challenge of working with various IT groups to deliver on a particular pattern of use in relation to the portal. He advocated the use of an “Integration Competency Centre”.

I then presented on Enterprise Architecture and its links to metadata and SOA. Some of this material is already on my posting on SOA Definitions, SOA Metadata and the Zachman Framework. I will elaborate in a future posting.

John Fisher from the NZ Ministry of Education showed us some great business modelling techniques that had found favour with his users. The technique involved Business Element Models, Business Component Models, Business Role Responsibilities and Business Service Models. The models were focussed on producing requirements for widely federated (eg. For 2,700 schools) SOA systems. He introduced the analogy of using power adapter so could use a drill brought in the UK to explain SOA to users.

Jan McConchie of SA Government ICT Services provided an overview of the challenges that she has to bring together the South Australian Government Services to present a common face to the South Australian citizen. This was interesting because the SA Government has established and Office of the CIO and this is showing the desire to coordinate and rationalise government IT activities. As one of the agencies involved, my organisation will be affected by standardisation and IT governance changes. Jan drew on research by Gartner and Saugutuck Technology to explain what SOA meant to her and discussed some initiatives in place for the SA Government.

Chris Howard was from the State Revenue Office of Victoria. Chris focused on risk and SOA and quoted Gartner, advising that it would take 3-4 years before investments in SOA payed off. He discussed a long term plan for legacy transition which was underpinned by full and frank statements about costs, benefits and risks with his business. Chris endorsed ITIL as an enabler of SOA.

Josh ran an interactive session where we discussed the issues of SOA and getting the business on board. It was never clear what you will find when you "turn over rocks" in the analysis process. We discussed what services to build first. It was not always best to do the low risk, high value project first. In the end it might just be business or legislative imperatives that help you make the decision. It was difficult to decide when to do those cross-cutting "hygiene" services.

George Cascales from Integral Energy discussed how he was implementing SOA in an out-sourced environment. He had a small group of architects and had succeeded in being able to develop new applications quickly using reused services. His group focused on standards and governance rather than the actual development. A set of tools and standards would be given to contract developers to develop the services and applications.

Rajat Chopra, the international speaker from Bell Canada provided a good description of how Bell embraced SOA. It was important for Bell to provide common services to serve its various customer channels for selling telecommunication facilities. Rajat provided us with a number of analogies for explaining SOA to management including Lego blocks, a car factory and diet. With diets, you can latch onto gimmicks but in the end it is lifestyle change that makes the difference. This is the same with SOA.

Alex Jouravlev representing the ACS presented twice. Alex’s first presentation was titled Prepare IT and Business for SOA. He traces the origins of SOA back to 1988. He made the point that our business cases do not really engage the business and we need to strive for simple messages using language the business understands to achieve a ‘mental ownership’. Alex supported the model driven architecture approaches but not for the reasons that they were developed. Business requirements should be developed with referencing any ‘system’ and should be modelled with Visual UML Models. Alex noted that several modelling practices that were usually acknowledged as important were often missed. These include Conceptual Business Modelling, Conceptual Data Modelling, Business Object Modelling and producing an Enterprise Ontology.

Later in the day Alex was able to present a model based on CMMI maturity model in an easy-to-understand fashion with the purpose of moving the SOA objective from IT to the business as an organisation obtains more SOA maturity. Alex was able to give us a realistic view of the limitations that would be expected at each level of maturity and provide an insight into how the role of key players like the Enterprise Architect and Business Analyst would change at the various levels.

Ram Kumar was from OASIS and provided an insight into the work of this organisation that is emersed in creating SOA standards. He discussed his role in developing the Justice Sector Information Interchange standard. This was of special interest to me because of my involvement in this sector. Ram emphasised the importance of XML governance and advocated this for successful SOA.

Josh summarised the conference and he may discuss this on his own blog site. Many themes resonated with me but one stands out as I wrestle with my in-flight dinner. We had slides from at least three of the speakers that showed insanely complicated maps of their existing systems. It seems we are all lumbered with integration spaghetti and our hope is that SOA will resolve this.

Hype Cycle for Application Development

I recently read an article from Gartner Research (Hype Cycle for Application Development, ID Number G00147982). Generally I find the material from Gartner great. It's reasonably independent and provides the right level of detail for me mostly. It costs alot to access so you have to find an employer or university to part with the cash to subscribe. I recently heard from a vendor of mapping software that said Gartner wanted $40k to do a review of their software and include them in an appropriate "Magic Quadrant". So their independence is not absolute.

The "Hype Cycle" article was a good summary of what is happening in software development today and the relative maturity of a number of technologies, concepts and product sets. It was handy to brush up on some acronyms. ARAD SODA apparently means Architected Rapid Application Development Services-Oriented Development of Application. You can also have Architected, Model-Driven SODA. Now that seems to be putting all the current buzzwords together in a couple of long acronyms. When did 'architect' become a verb? Any way now I know that what I am trying to do at work is a SODA and, even though I quibble about the grammar, I want it to be architected.

The article itself was written by a number of contributors and provide a mix of succinct insightful writing and some marketing waffle. One of the less well defined concepts was Enterprise Information Management (EIM) which is its 'technical trigger' phase rising to a 'peak of inflated expectations'. I find EIM a little similar to Knowledge Management (KM) which in turn can be almost anything related to the enterprise. KM can be include building design, HR practices and telephone lists. It was one of those definitions that a like to ask "What is it not?" and more to the point "How is it useful?". EIM, like KM will be more an approach to looking at the whole organisation. This may bring up some useful concepts. KM seemed to spawn the concepts of tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. Before that people talked about the "stuff in our heads" and the "stuff written down" or for the geeks "biological data stores" and "digital data stores". Tacit knowledge was a vaguely useful concept. I don't think I'll championing my organisation to do EIM.

One of the more insightful parts of this article was the analysis of SOA by Roy Shulte and Yefim Natis. I am glad to see SOA is climbing the 'Slope of Enlightenment'. Something I have been struggling with is how many services my organisation has developed. I had assumed the number was zero until one of my senior developers showed me a list of all the EJBs he had built to access mainframe data and said "look at all these services". This did no fill me confidence. In a service I expect to see late binding, loose coupling, an XML interface, some aspect of self description and the ability to integrate using business process technology. Most of the SOA definitions I have seen are pretty vague and some a clearly business focused. These did no give me the ammunition to say that this was not the type of service I had in mind. The definition added to what I had seen previously.

"An application is an SOA application if it s modular; the modules are distributable; software developers have written or generated interface metadata that specifies and explicitly contract so that another developer can find and use the service; the interface is separate from the implementation (code and data) of the service provider; and the services are shareable..."

This should give me something to work on when I say I want this sort of service. Of course I could just say I want a web services with a SOAP interface. That might be easier. I get told SOA is not just web services though.

Hype cycles have their detractors but in general these hype cycles help see the big picture. IT shops are bombarded with a huge number of technologies. We are made to feel inferior by the marketers and our more progressive staff that we are behind because we are not employing the latest tools and techniques. The bottom line though is that many of these tools and techniques are not mature. They do not actually benefit all organisations and it takes time for conservative organisations to reap any benefit from investment some products that are billed as the next big thing.