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.

Currently keywords are used to search for everything, including images, videos, and music.  This will change in the future, to search for an image you’ll supply another image.  Think this won’t happen, think again.  Image-crunchers Like.com and Polar Rose, and music-matchmaker Pandora have taken some early steps towards this more media-centric Web.

When searching for images and music today, you are really searching for the words that surround them .   When you search for “Steve Jobs” using Google Image Search, you aren’t really looking for images of Apple’s CEO.  You’re looking for filenames and captions that contain those keywords, “Steve” and “Jobs”, and hoping the right photos are somewhere nearby.

The two are completely different.  On any given image search, Google turns up countless photos completely unrelated to the query, even as it overlooks countless others that may be a perfect match.  Ultimately you are relying on Web publishers to annotate their images accurately, and that’s a hit-or-miss proposition.

Similar situtations exist for MP3s, podcasts, and other sound files.  You can search for “4Him” or “Why?” when trolling Web-based music sites.  But what if you are looking for music that sounds like 4Him?  Wouldn’t it be nice if you could use one song to find another song?

Ojos and Polar Rose are tacking the image side of the issue.  The photo sharing tool Riya, from Ojos, automatically tags you photos using face recognition.  Instead of having to manually add “Mom” tags to all your photos of Mom, you can show Riya what she looks like, and it adds the tags for you.  Riya has gained momentum since it was launched and Ojos quickly realized that Riya face-rec engine could be used for Web-wide image search.

That’s no small feat but, with an alpha service experience called Like.com, the company is already offering a simple prototype.  Currently, Like.com is barely more than a shopping engine.   You select a photo of a product that best represents what you’re looking for, and you are shown all sorts of similar products.  But it’s an excellent proof-of-concept.

Polar Rose introduced a brower plug-in that does face recognition with any photo posted to any web site.  Currently, it’s simply a means of automatically tagging images, similar to Riya.  Unlike Riya, it already works across the legnth and breadth of the Net.

The closet audio equivalent is Pandora from the Music Genome Project, a group of “musicians and music-loving technologists”.  Over the past six plus years, the group has analyzed songs from over 10,000 artists, carefully notating the music makeup of each track.  Using this data and a list of your favorite artists, Pandora can instantly construct a new collection of songs that suit your tastes.  This is hardly a Web-wide search engine, and unlike the image service expereinces from Ojos and Polar Rose, it relies on human input.  We are inching ever closer to true media searching.

Have you ever wondered what the Internet will look like in the future?  Most people have heard of some aspect of what has been called web 2.0.  You know things like social networking, lightweight programming, web as a platform, and collective intelligence.  Most people recognize these by their street names Facebook, AJAX, Google Maps, and wikipedia respectively.

Many people refer to Web 3.0 as the semantic web.  The semantic web is where machines read web pages as humans do today.  A web where search engines and software agents peruse “the Net” and find us what we’re looking for.  Some of the technologies required to perform such tasks exist today including the Resource description Framework (RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL).  These work by adding all sorts of machine readable metadata to human readable web pages.

These technologies are beginning to trickle into real-world sites, service experiences, and tools.  Examples of these technologies can be seen with Yahoo!’s food site, which is driven by semantic metadata, the semantic portal developed by Radar Networks, the Jena development platform being creating at HP, and the Oracle Spatial database.

Just as much of life, the semantic web is a good-news, bad-news thing.  You can do all these wonderfully complex queries, but it takes a tremendous amount of time and metadata to make it happen.  This is due to having to completely re-annotate the entire Web in order to make existing web pages machine readable.

For this reason, many researchers opt for a very different approach to the semantic web.  Instead of an overhaul of Web formats, they’re building agents that can better understand the Web pages of today.  The pages aren’t easier to read, but rather the software agents are getting smarter.

There are some early examples of these smart agents, one particular example is the BlueOrganizer from AdaptiveBlue.  This browser plug-in, in certain situations, can understand what web pages are about and automatically retrieve related information from other sites and service experiences.  For instance, if you visit a movie blog and read about a particular film, it immediately links to sites where you can buy or rent the film.

There is yet a third view of the semantic web taken by so called “semantic searchers”.  Rather than providing automatic information retrieval, semantic search engines seek to improve on the Google-like search model that we’ve grown so accustomed to.  the idea is to move beyond mere keyword searches to a better understanding of natural-language queries.  This type of natural-language processing has been in development for years and now is beginning to find its way onto the public Web.  Several start-ups, like Powerset and TextDigger are developing semantic search engines based on the open source academic project WordNet.

While many associate Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web, the two are far from synonymous.  There are countless other concepts ready to alter our online experiences of the future.  Many of these concepts go beyond semantics using space, images, and sound.

One such concept is the so called 3D Web, a Web you can walk through.  This has been seen as an extension to the “virtual worlds” popping up on today’s Web.  It has been said that the Web of the future will be the big alternate universe reminiscent of Second Like and There.com.

As with everything in like there are those who scoff at this notion of the 3d Web.  They see the 3D Web as a re-creation of our existing world.  On the 3D Web, you can take a virtual tour of an unfamiliar neighborhood and shop for houses or visit famous sites you’ve never seen.  Google earth already offers a similar experience.  The problem is that 3D only goes so far and doesn’t enhance the 2D world of text, pictures, and video.  An interesting idea beginning to emerge is that of a media-centric Web which offers not only language-based search but pure media search.  Today’s searching mechanisms rely primarily on keywords, even when searching for images, videos, and songs, this is a woefully inadequate approach.  companies like Ojos and Polar Rose are looking to reinvent media search, hinting at a world where we search for media with other media, not just keywords.

We can’t forget about the Pervasive Web, a Web that’s everywhere.  The Web already reaches beyond the desktop, to cell phones and handhelds, but who says it has to stop there.  What about having the  windows in your home open when the temperature changes.  By leveraging mesh networks, wireless networks consisting of tiny nodes that can route data to and from almost anywhere, the possibilities are endless.

Web 2.0 has the potential of having a greater impact on business process management (BPM) than Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and AJAX have had thus far.  Business users are expecting to have the user experience with their ERP and CRM systems at the office that they get with YouTube and blogs at home.

The full impact that Web 2.0 will have on business in general and in particular how organizations handle business processes has not been envisioned by anyone.

Web 2.0 today is where AJAX was just two years ago.  AJAX wasn’t that big two years ago but now is the center of the Ultimus Human Service Bus (HSB).  The Ultimus HBS is designed for the “human centric” process aspects of BPM.

A pre-Ajax business process might have required the user to fill out a form in Word or Excel and then attach it to an email in Outlook.  This process then involved two different applications – Word and Outlook – that really weren’t talking to each other directly. The Word file was sent via Outlook, but other than whatever note the user might type into the email explaining what the attachment was, there was no relationship between what was written in Word and the process Outlook was performing.

Now with AJAX it is possible to eliminate the separate form in Word and the Outlook attachment process.  One day a process engineer will be able to create a process where the form document is shared via Ajax with the appropriate people in the process so this eliminates the need to attach a form document to an email and send it along.  The information in the form becomes part of the process rather than being a separate document.  the current social networking of consumer Web 2.0, which is about information sharing, will inspire the next generation of BPM.

Wouldn’t it be nice to “flip the switch” and have all your legacy applications extend to some type of service component?  Well that is the goal of OpenSpan of Alpharetta,GA.  OpenSpan’s technology takes a unique approach to integration by coming at applications through the presentation layer.  The OpenSpan technology “injects” itself in a running application to expose the objects and provide IT organizations with an “instant API” for developing integration and automation solutions.

Rather than the now-common Google maps and Salesforce.com automation mashups, OpenSpan allows organizations to integrate a Google search engine with an Excel spreadsheet so that marketing personnel can place the results into rows and columns in Excel

Wouldn’t it be nice to “flip the switch” and have all your legacy applications extend to some type of service component?  Well that is the goal of OpenSpan of Alpharetta,GA.  OpenSpan’s technology takes a unique approach to integration by coming at applications through the presentation layer.  The OpenSpan technology “injects” itself in a running application to expose the objects and provide IT organizations with an “instant API” for developing integration and automation solutions.

Rather than the now-common Google maps and Salesforce.com automation mashups, OpenSpan allows organizations to integrate a Google search engine with an Excel spreadsheet so that marketing personnel can place the results into rows and columns in Excel

The long awaited arrival of WS-BPEL 2.0 is finally over.  After an almost four year wait WS-BPEL 2.0 is an approved OASIS standard.

Organizations can use WS-BPEL to specify business process behavior and exclusively relies on Web services. It supports two different kinds of processes: executable business processes, which can be executed by a BPEL engine such as Oracle BPEL Process Manager, IBM’s WebSphere Process Server, ActiveBPEL, Apache Ode, and others; and abstract business processes that are not intended to be executed and specify some agreed behavior that parties in a communication scenario can agree upon. Microsoft also supports BPEL, although mostly as an add-on for interoperability reasons.  Microsoft already supports BPEL in its ESB product BizTalk Server. Now the company has announced its plans to support BPEL within the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), which is integrated into Windows Vista. BPEL will be supported by a set of WF activities available as BPEL for Windows Workflow Foundation.  According to Paul Andrew, Windows Workflow Foundation Technical Product Manager at Microsoft,

“the CTP release will implement the BPEL 1.1 specification. The final release of BPEL for Windows Workflow Foundation will implement the OASIS BPEL 2.0 standard and is planned for release in Q4 of calendar year 2007.”

WS-BPEL 2.0 is the sucessor to BPEL4WS 1.1, which in turn was created based on IBM’s WSFL and Microsoft’s XLANG. To some degree, WS-BPEL competes with the choreography specification currently being standardized at W3C, the WS-CDL (Web Services Choreography Description language), currently in candidate recommendation status.

The OASIS WS-BPEL wiki has some information on what is new in version 2.0. More information is also available in the official press release and on the BPEL TC part of the OASIS web site.