In a recent discussion with several colleagues a comment was made that by shortening the time to market of new capabilities, hosted on a services infrastructure, a claims process could be improved.  This reminds me of some old thinking that if you simply apply more hardware and/or software to a problem you’ll eventually resolve it. 

Enterprises can not resolve process issues simply by speeding deployment of new services/capabilities in a services ecosystem.  Without analyzing, optimizing, and possibly re-engineering business processes the process will remain the same no matter how many, nor how fast, services are provisioned.  If processes are flawed they will still be flawed even if you deploy technology/capabilities faster.

The calendar has been booked solid for awhile now.  However, starting to lighten up a bit.  I’ve been traveling quite a bit delivering training class, conducting demonstrations, and speaking at conferences.  Just wanted to thank the InfoWorld folks for asking me to conduct a keynote at this years SOA Executive Forum in NYC,all-in-all a pretty good forum.  Also, wanted to let all the newsletter subscribers to hang in there, we’re working on resurrecting the newsletter to be bigger and better.  Also, working on a new set of training classes and tech bites plus a book.  So stay tuned for all this and more.  If you would like to find me in the mean-time check me out on these:

Twitter: soachief

LinkedIn: Tim Vibbert

Facebook: Tim Vibbert

I had heard about something called twitter from a few people recently and was reading a posting yesterday so I had to check this thing out.  Twitter is a kewl little service/site, that allows people to drop little twitter notes on their life so friends can keep track of them, in between blog entries where the kewl things in life occurr. I was able to locate and follow several friends, based on my gmail contact lists, that were already members.  So if you want to see what really goes on in the life of the SOA Chief, check me out at SOA Chief on twitter

I was listening to a videocast from a well known and respected industry analyst just yesterday and something mentioned in the cast reinvigorated some ideas that I have mentioned several times in the past.

Several questions mentioned in the cast were of the nature like “Do you have a SOA?” and “How many SOAs do you have?” These sort of comments, questions are the norm for many of organizations due to many people thinking that SOA is something that you can buy or build. These two notions could not be any further from the truth. But, as I have stated many times before, SOA is an approach taken, a mindset adopted, while building systems. Organizations can build service ecosystems and systems that expose/rely on service-oriented principles.

Current funding models, attitudes, incentives, SDLC processes, and most everything in an organization are in total opposition to SOA adoption. This is why SOA is so disruptive to organizations.

SOA is not an overnight change but rather a lengthy journey. I have stated this several times in the past and have even created a section of a training class around planning for the journey. This journey can not be completed in months, as some believe, but rather will consume many years.

SOA imposes significant cultural changes. SOA is more about culture and social changes rather than technology. The technology is just enabling the SOA principles and is not SOA itself.

My advice would be to be cautious of those who make such statements and be careful not to ask these sorts of questions. One final thought, if you were to ask someone from the Netherlands if the had a SOA you would receive some concerned looks and responses. You see SOA in Holland stands for Sexual Oriented Afflictions, sexual oriented diseases.

ebizQ reported yesterday that IBM has announced a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) center dedicated to assisting U.S. Federal agencies in adopting and benefiting from SOA Inforamtion Technology (IT) initiatives.  The IBM Federal SOA Institute has three manadates that is will focus on:

• innovation
• solution development
• education

In a statement recevied by ebizQ Anne K. Altman, Managing Director of IBM’s U.S. Federal business stated “We believe this first-of-a-kind center will help Federal agencies identify new ways to build and utilize IT systems, quickly improve and reuse legacy systems, and reduce overall application development, operations and management.”

The statement also detailed some of the inner workings of the new Federal SOA Inisitute.

“The IBM Federal SOA Institute includes dedicated technology and consulting resources to support Federal organizations, and those serving this specialized community. A key goal of the institute will be to spur innovation by cultivating collaboration among IBM researchers, universities, and Federal agencies. In the institute’s working lab, SOA methodologies and technologies are being designed, tested and demonstrated specifically for Federal environments. The lab is also assisting with customer-related pilots, and serving as a central location to collect reusable technology assets and best practices that can accelerate customer acceptance. As part of the educational mission, the institute has launched a speaker series for senior level customers and technology partners on topics such as SOA Governance, Service Oriented Modeling, Security, and Reuse of Legacy Assets in an SOA. In the future, practitioner level briefings will be organized to exchange ideas from both the public and private sector.”

The IBM Federal SOA Institute is part of a long term commitment by IBM to the Federal community, which includes significant investments in software, hardware, research and services. IBM has more than 80 distinguished engineers and architects dedicated to helping solve the unique IT challenges of federal government agencies In addition to the institute, IBM has two Federally focused Competency Centers in the Washington, DC region that offer organizations the opportunity to learn and test new IBM and Federal Systems Integrator (FSI) capabilities that large and small organizations can use to address Financial Management, Human Capital Management, Collaboration, and Supply Chain requirements.

An announcement was made during IBM’s Federal SOA Executive Summit in Washington, DC

So what does this mean to companies like Northrup Grumman, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin?  IMNHO, this should raise some eyebrows of those types of organizations.  For years these traditional federal contractors have kinda had the corner on that marketspace and have relied upon vendors such as IBM to provide the hardware and software necessary.  With the opening of this Federal SOA Institute, IBM seems to be saying “yeah we can provide you with the hardware and software, but oh by the way we undestand SOA and  have centers solely dedicated to helping you solve your problems utilzing SOA.”  Seems like traditional federal contractors and system integrators might have some bew competition.

Most people have heard of the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I).  They’re the ones that brought us the original WS-I profiles, the WS-I Basic Profile, and the SOAP Profile and the Attachments Profile which provided information on how to use SOAP 1.1, WSDL 1.1, and UDDI 2.0, and the SOAP with attachments specifications.

Well now they have released a new profile that marries SOAP security with interoperability, the WS-I Basic Security Profile (BSP) 1.0.  The BSP eeks to add the missing link of interoperability for Web services developers using the OASIS WS-Security standard and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology.  With the BSP people can make sure they’re designing shareable, interoperable Web services that can interface securely. One of the strengths of the profile is that it covers interoperability for WS-Security and SSL.  This will go along way to help ensure secure interoperability once vendors begin supporting it.

I recently came across are presentation given by Lockheed Martin IS&GS’s own Melvin Greer discussing modeling an SOA through its reusable of service components.  This is a pretty good discussion on the value and impact of reusable service components.  If you are interested check out Melvin’s Brainstorm SOA Conference presentation “Service Oriented Architecture Modeling Via Reuse of Service Components” and the corresponding audio.

Many organizatione struggle on the cost estimation of their SOA activities.  To often they underestimate considerably.  So, how do you calculate the cost of an SOA?  In a recent artcile Dave Linthicum provided some general guidlelines for doing just that. SOA = (Data Complexity cost + Service Complexity cost+ Process Complexity cost + Enabling Technology cost)

Data Complexity cost = (((Number of Data Elements) * Complexity of the Data Storage Technology) * Labor Units))

• Number of Data Elements being the number of semantics you’re tracking in your domain, new or derived.
• Complexity of the Data Storage Technology, expressed as a percentage between 0 and 1 (0% to 100%). For instance, Relational is a .3, Object-Oriented is a .6, and ISAM is a .8.

So, at $100 a labor unit, or the amount of money it takes to understand and refine one data element, we could have:

Cost of Data Complexity = (((3,000) * .8) * $100)

Cost of Data Complexity = $150,000 USD, the amount of money needed to both understand and refine the data so it fits into your SOA

Once you understand this Dave says apply the same notions to:

• Service Complexity cost

• Process Complexity cost

• Enabling Technology cost

For more information read Dave’s artcile "How Much Will Your SOA Cost?"

SOA development services have become a hot topic in recent months with the establishment of SOA development centers in several countries, India and China primarily, by several large organizations.  The latest to announce center openings is Accenture.  Accenture has established a center in India in order to build applications based on SOA principles using Sun Microsystems technologies.

The Accenture center is focused on developing composite applications that bring identity and access management into the SOA paradigm.  These reusable assets are targeting markets such as government and telecommunications.  Accenture, like many other large organizations, is off-shoring to places like India to take advantage of the lower costs.

The center will utilize the Identity Management Suite, Java Composite Application Platform Suite, and Solaris OS technologies from Sun Microsystems.  Sun is also providing some staff to the center.

This is a similar move the IBM did when they established SOA centers in Beijing and Pune ,India.  The IBM centers develop SOA based applications that can be reused by various customers.

There is a need to look at what it costs companies to operate within the U.S. compared to other countries and restructure things to make it more inviting or this off-shoring trend will only continue and grow.  The overhead required in the U.S., from legal, facilities, insurance and employee benefits, compounded with labor rates and cost of living is why many companies look to other countries.  Now with everyone under the sun being able to develop service components the competition is going to be fierce.  This is especially true for large system integrators(LSI’s) because they are going to see competitors like never before.  These new competitors are going to employ new business models and lightweight process frameworks which will cause LSI’s to rethink their rates and business model or they will be by-passed. 

One of the areas that I’ve been thinking about for a while has to do with the "paper side" of SOA, write more about this later.  I read a recent article, by Jason Bloomberg of Zapthink, that addressed a piece of paper that I had lefted out that being the Request for Proposal (RFP). 

Many organizations are struggling with their SOA activities for one reason of another and are looking for external assistance to help progress them along their SOA roadmaps.  Some are leaning on vendors, others on consulting firms, and many have found that the best help is provided by those who offer a combination of products and professional services.  In order to select a firm most release an RFP to potential providers.

In his article Jason points out some pitfalls of SOA RFPs and offers some pointers for constructing effective SOA RFPs.

I have to agree with the conclusions that Jason draws which is that that "the entire RFP process is not well-suited to SOA initiatives."  He goes on to say that "the traditional requirements ⇒ design ⇒ develop ⇒ test ⇒ deploy methodology is entirely inappropriate for SOA, because of the need to build for ongoing requirements change. So, for an organization looking to bring in a third party, the requirements ⇒ RFP ⇒ design… approach makes no sense either."  Jason says that organizations should partner with such providers in order to progress along their SOA journeys on two of the jurisdictions of concerns that I mentioned in my "Preparing for the SOA Journey" whitepaper, organizational and technical.