I was thinking about the old adage that the acronym IT can be separated into "information" and "technology" with the majority of the value often being in the first term. In recent years, we have seem many enterprise architecture organizations make great progress on "technical architecture" and begin putting more focus on "information architecture."

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One of the most interesting new areas of research I have seen is the work led by Bill Clark on Context Delivery Architecture. I was looking over his presentation and ran across this slide:

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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.

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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

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Today, I would like to take a moment to recognize the thought leading research that Roy Schulte has produced over the years. Personally, I find that nothing gives a better perspective of the future than to take a bit of time to learn from the past. On 12 April 1996, Roy Schulte was the lead author on our first set of notes on SOA, research which first introduced the term to the industry:
• "Service Oriented" Architectures, Part 1
• "Service Oriented" Architectures, Part 2
• Middleware for Service-Oriented Architectures
• Guidelines for Implementing Service-Oriented Applications

Two years later, Roy was central in creating the first Gartner application integration conference which included in-depth analysis of SOA. This marks the 10th anniversary that conference which has been held twice a year in the US (20 times in total) and up to seven times around the world.

In this podcast, Roy gives us his thoughts on SOA, application integration, and what we should all be focused on for the next 10 years.

As a wrap-up to this post, let me take use back to the research notes from 1996 for a moment. Some of the comments Roy makes in SOA Part 2 should give us all pause. Roy said service-oriented topologies:
• Are not attractive for casual application development because they require some of the inevitable disciplines of reuse, e.g., design standards, quality assurance, formal administration, incentives to encourage reuse and maintenance of a documented inventory of available services
• Will not replace two-tier C/S applications that are built with desktop-based tools. Legacy PC 4GLs are widely entrenched, and end users often demand control of some of their software development. Small applications whose scope is limited to one person, workgroup or department may be developed faster and easier without the rigor of services.
• Provide no clear benefit for service functions unique to a single application, although it is difficult to predict that any function will not become a candidate for sharing in the future.

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For those of you who attend events in London, or have colleagues who can, I want to make sure that you know we have a SOA and Application Development & Integration Summit in London 25-26 June. This Summit will cover many of the same subjects covered in this blog. The big difference will be a greater focus on multi-enterprise business-to-business (B2B) issues – the evolution of what many of us knew as EDI. Paolo Malinverno is the conference chairperson. Read "Key Issues for Mutlienterprise B2B Integration, 2008" to get a better feel for some of the unique content covered in London.

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Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a major focus area for application professionals and architects alike. At times, I think the real name for the Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit should just be the "SOA Summit," since it is one of the major unifying themes and driving forces across applications in general. For those of you not familiar with SOA, here is our recently updated SOA Overview and Guide to SOA Research.


At this point, many organizations have had SOA-related initiatives underway for several years. As can be expected with a major new approach, there have been a fair number of failures as well as successes. Here is a multimedia version of the keynote from the last time we held this Summit - SOA: Now is the time (to deliver), where we take the position that SOA is the right approach to be pursuing now.


Notice how this presentation is not only about SOA. For those that are ahead of the game it touches on advanced SOA concepts such as web oriented architecture (WOA) and context-aware SOA. It also covers underlying middleware platforms, new web technologies, and governance. The last point - governance - is often the greatest challenge in the SOA world, and in the applications world in general. More on that in a post in the near future...

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