I recently read a blog post commenting on an SOA Governance presentation by Frank Kenney. The entry starts "It's 11:00. Do you know where your services are?" For those of us that grew up on the east coast of the U.S., this brings back the old opening line from a popular news show: "It’s 11:00, do you know where your children are?"

In my mind, the comparison is very apropos. In the SOA world, services can be like children in that they constantly surprise us and often have a knack for getting themselves (and us) into trouble. Having three children myself, it is often all I can do just to get through a basic task like going to the grocery store.

The real point, as I've often heard Frank point out, is that we MUST keep track of the services that tend to pop up around us. This means that we need to know not only the basics about a service, but also things like: Which applications are using the service? Who are the users? Are the users happy? What service levels should they reasonably expect? What new capabilities do they desire? In other words, we truly need to put on a "service mentality," just like an energy company or healthcare services provider, rather than thinking of applications as "products."

I provided several relevant pointers to SOA governance sessions and research in the SOA Horror Stories post. Another great session to check out is Patterns and Guidelines for Starting with SOA and Moving to Advanced SOA by our conference chairperson, Yefim Natis. You should also consider scheduling a one-to-one session with Frank Kenney or Paolo Malinverno.

Submit a Comment | Permalink

We've just announced a new session on the agenda Top Ten Ways EA Will Lower Your Costs – An Open Forum where a panel of analysts will discuss all the ways in which your EA can help optimize your costs. But we want this to be more than a handful of us telling the audience what to do. This session - and this blog – are places where users can share their ideas of what's worked and what hasn't when it comes to EA-driven cost savings. We'll reward the best submission with the hottest gizmo that money can buy right now (a Nintendo Wii console) and five runner-ups will get a free two year subscription to Money Magazine.

Let me start with a couple of my own suggestions as to how EA can save money. EA can help save money by reducing complexity through a march to a few common flavors of something rather than dozens of variations. A great example is the savings that many organizations have achieved by migrating from dozens of varieties of proprietary servers to a few, commodity "scale out" servers. EA can also help guide which systems and technologies should be retired, which can save a ton of money long term, although it often requires some up-front investment.

1 Comment | Submit a Comment | Permalink

In a previous post, I mentioned that one of our most popular sessions is SOA Horror Stories. We are looking for new stories. If you have one, please submit it to pascal.winckel@gartner.com. We will keep all submissions anonymous with respect to the way we tell the story. The best story gets a $250 Amazon gift certificate and 2 runners up get $50 each. Please send your story by May 30th...keep it short! (500 words or less)

Submit a Comment | Permalink

A couple of years ago, we worked with a large number of clients to pull together a view of the most important things applications leaders of all types must do on an on-going basis. This came together into the Application Leaders Activity Cycle:



You can read more about this in our "2008 Research Agenda for Application Leaders" or have a one-to-one meeting with Susan Landry.

Note that "Innovate" is one of the major things all applications leaders need to do. One great source of innovation is all the small vendors bringing cutting edge new ideas to market. We just published our latest special report on many innovative ideas and vendors: "Cool Vendors 2008 – Innovation From Around the World." This report contains over 40 detailed research notes looking at cool vendors in various spaces. Here are a few of the detailed notes that you might find particularly interesting: Application Development, Platform Integration and Middleware and Web Technologies. One great thing about the Summits is that you can visit with several of these vendors live.

Submit a Comment | Permalink

Many application leaders feel that their greatest challenge is not the technology side of the picture, but rather it is the people and behavior side of things. For years, the applications world has been talking about worthy goals such as driving re-use, improving quality, and becoming more agile. We have collectively spent a huge amount of time and money chasing the latest "shiny object." Back when I first got into the applications world in the 1980s, we all chased the promise of object orientation, stored procedures, remote procedure calls, etc. On the quality side, some of us spent tons of money on testing suites, scripts, etc. All too often, the end result was that we did the same things with increasingly fancy (and expensive) tools and technologies. This led to a painful adage – a fool with a tool is still a fool.

A different way to say this is that the real challenge we need to tackle is governance and management. Matt Hotle leads our research on applications governance, and has recently recorded a great podcast – You Don't "Do" Governance. He also recently wrote "Key Issues for Application Management and Governance," which is a great overview to this subject. We have an entire track dedicated to "Governance and Management: Fellow Citizens of Agility and Innovation" at the AADI Summit. For those of you that are Gartner for IT Leaders customers, Matt and a bunch of great governance research are highlighted on the Applications Leaders homepage this week – make sure to check it out.

Submit a Comment | Permalink

Dan Sholler mentioned to me that as he was building the presentation for the Future of Integration Keynote, it struck him that integration and creating interoperability between systems is becoming tied more and more to the web.
He was working on this slide:





Dan's take is that we all have been doing "the web" for many years. However, it is only now that we are really seeing the need to use the technologies, techniques and standards from the web as the architecture of our enterprise applications. He believes this shift creates obvious technological challenges (for example, how to build user interface components, and whether we can run client-side standalone software in a browser). However, it also is causing a re-think of some of our fundamental designs. For example, taking a resource-oriented approach to our information models exposes many of the anomalies that have been lurking there for years.

As we move toward integration that is more widespread, and more event driven, we also must move toward integration that is more standardized, and that standardization must exist across more domains than ever before. Ultimately we must envision our internal IT capabilities as part of the larger web-federation, or the vision of SOA, of composite applications, and of modern integration will not come to pass. For those of you interested in this subject, there is an entire track of sessions dedicated to Effective Integration in the Age of SOA.

Submit a Comment | Permalink

One of the sessions that I am most looking forward to is Nick Carr's keynote entitled "The Big Switch: How the New Grid Will Transform IT?" Many of you probably first heard of Nick when you read his 2003 article "IT Doesn't Matter" in Harvard Business Review in which he set the stage for the critical debate about the strategic value of IT. He has since written a book on the subject, "Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage" and has a blog of his own called Rough Type.

Nick has a new book entitled "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google," which he will be giving away and signing immediately after his keynote. Nick has generously provided a chapter online. The keynote will dive into the themes of this book, including the idea of more and more computing functions shifting from internal data centers to the Internet's vast computing grid. His recent post regarding Amazon's AWS reaching high "diversity" and "load" factors is an interesting case in point.

Daryl Plummer will moderate this keynote and is leading Gartner's efforts on the cloud computing aspects of this discussion. See his session at the EA Summit: "How Cloud Computing Will Change Your Future." Those of you attending AADI, make sure to check out the virtual track dedicated to this concept: SaaS & Cloud Computing.

1 Comment | Submit a Comment | Permalink

In a previous post, I mentioned many organizations are actively pursuing SOA. Unfortunately, not all of these attempts have been successful. One of the most widely attended sessions at our Summits has been a very entertaining, and at times painful, presentation entitled "SOA Horror Stories" by Paolo Malinverno and Massimo Pezzini.

I have personally spoken to numerous clients that have gone through their own horror stories. The most common root causes of the failures that I have seen stem from age-old IT issues: poor engagement with the business and poor governance.

When asked, "What is the value of SOA?" many business people wonder what the acronym means. Many IT people dive into the technical profundities of web services standards (WS*), enterprise service busses, and registries/repositories. Senior architects and applications leaders wax eloquently about "agility" and "re-use." If your business and IT people cannot collectively agree on the business value of pursuing SOA, look at that as a huge warning sign. You should check out the Anthony Bradley's session "Finding the Value in SOA." Another great session in this vein is "SOA Case Studies."

A classic example of poor governance is a conversation I had with an IT Leader from a large company in South Africa. He mentioned that they were several years down the road on an SOA initiative and now had close to 1900 "services." He said there were so many that nobody could make any sense of it. Basically, all the developers and contractors in his organization caught on to the idea that if their work was "WS*-compliant," then all the senior people would be happy. This led me to ask a simple question: how many of the services are used in more than one application? My personal inclination is that a service that is re-used in less than three applications is not really a service, it is just a WS* compliant piece of code! The ultimate tests of a service are whether developers use it in their applications and users are happy.

Those of you tackling the governance side of the SOA equation should definitely read "Key Issues for SOA Governance Technologies." You should also plan on attending:

- Application and SOA Governance – The Who, What and Why
- Application and SOA Governance – The How, When, and With What
- SOA Governance Case Study

Submit a Comment | Permalink