One of my responsibilities for the SOA Consortium is planning and moderating the member meeting program.  And self-congratulations aside, I have to say our programs offer excellent speakers, insights and conversations.  Continuing this trend, I'm thrilled to share that Jeanne Ross, Director and Principal Research Scientist of MIT's Center for Information Systems Research, has agreed to keynote our September meeting in Orlando.  Yes, Jeanne Ross, co-author of Enterprise Architecture as Strategy, and IT Governance.  I know, my EA roots are showing.

Joining Jeanne on the agenda are Dr. Michael J. Kurtz, Assistant Archivist for Records Services, Washington DC, National Archives and Records Administration, and Geoff Raines and Larry Pizette of MITRE Corporation. 

What follows is the latest information from my post on SOA Consortium Insights.  The meetings are open to the public.  Please consider joining us, and getting involved in the 'SOA Soapbox Derby'.

"Have the recordings from our earlier meetings enticed you to attend one in person?  Well, if you are a SOA practitioner, you'll definitely want to join us in Orlando on September 24-25 as we do a SOA reality check and dig into sustaining SOA success.

Kicking off our SOA reality check, I'm thrilled to share that Jeanne Ross, Director and Principal Research Scientist MIT Center for Information Systems Research, will be our keynote speaker.  In her talk, Jeanne will present new research on SOA Adoption & Value:

MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research and Diamond Management and Technology Consultants recently collaborated on research project surveying architecture leaders on SOA adoption, current practices, value and results and barriers to SOA success.

The research objective is to help those responsible for architecture better understand how their organizations stack up on a variety of key SOA metrics: investment, progress, reuse, and others.

In this presentation, Jeanne Ross will share the results of the survey analysis, including insights gained on the linkages, if any, between SOA initiatives and company financial performance.

And what would be a reality check, without real-world stories and lessons learned?  We have two great invited speaker sessions:

Dr. Michael J. Kurtz, Assistant Archivist for Records Services, Washington DC, National Archives and Records Administration, on Records Management in a Federal Service Oriented Environment

A multi-agency Records Management Service initiative has been undertaken by an Interagency Project Team composed of nineteen Federal Agencies under the leadership of the National Archives and Records Administration. The service is being developed in the context of the US Federal Government's over-arching approach to move to Service Oriented Architecture in the Enterprise Architecture of its agencies. This presentation provides an overview of the activities of a government Community of Practice defining and enabling a Records Management Service in order to realize the vision of Service Oriented Architecture in Federal Government.

 

Geoff Raines and Larry Pizette of MITRE Corporation on Leveraging Federal IT Investment – Using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

This presentation will explore SOA, as implemented through the common Web Services standards.  It offers Federal senior leadership teams a path forward, given the diverse and complex information technology (IT) portfolio that they have inherited, allowing for incremental and focused improvement of their IT support systems.  We will also discuss the SOA Trade space and briefly cover our project team’s efforts.

Rounding out our SOA reality check, our own Richard M. Soley, Executive Director of the SOA Consortium, will announce the winners of our case study contest, co-sponsored by CIO Magazine.  In addition to the announcements, Fill Bowen and I will share many of the SOA Lessons from Case Study Contest Entries.

And that's just Wednesday.  On Thursday, we focus our attention on sustaining SOA success.  After an invited speaker talk on SOA & ITIL, we'll have our first ever 'SOA Soapbox Derby'. 

The purpose of the SOA Soapbox Derby is to allow practitioners to exchange ideas on activities that are critical to sustaining SOA success.  Derby participants will have 10-15 minutes to soapbox, followed by another 15 minutes (or so) to engage in related conversation with meeting attendees.  Any practitioner attending the SOA Consortium meeting may participate in the 'SOA Soapbox Derby'.   For more information, contact me in advance, or onsite.

Thursday afternoon, we'll focus on community of practice activities, including the unveiling of the SOA Consortium Planning Framework. 

Interested?  For more information, including registration, please go here."

Posted by brendamichelson in SOA • SOA_Consortium • enterprise architecture • events/travel | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I realize it's much cooler to talk about how hyped technologies burst into flames in the real-world, but honestly, that's not my experience with SOA.  Nearly everyday, either through my work with SOA Consortium members or consulting/coaching, I interact with organizations that are attaining value using SOA approaches.  Now, that's not to say SOA is simple, it's not.  SOA requires transformation along technology, business, process and organizational aspects.  And as your services network grows in size, distribution and popularity, you'll face hard some hard challenges.  Luckily, there are organizations, such as Lockheed Martin, that are not only leading the way, but also contributing their learning and expertise to the broader community.

In his most recent talk at a SOA Consortium meeting, Mel Greer Lockheed Martin’s Chief SOA Architect, delivered a very engaging and thought-provoking talk on the topic of SOA Hard Problems and Spiral Solution Development.  The essence of that talk, and links to the audio recording and slides, follows, excerpted from my post on SOA Consortium Insights:

"The SOA Consortium was extremely fortunate to have Mel Greer, Lockheed Martin’s Chief SOA Architect, return to speak at our June meeting in Ottawa. Consistent with his March talk on SOA Competency Centers, Mel delivered a very engaging and thought-provoking talk on the topic of SOA Hard Problems and Spiral Solution Development.

Mel began by defining hard problems and spirals. Hard problems have three characteristics. First, a hard problem doesn’t go away over time. Second, left unresolved, a hard problem will have a significant negative impact on your SOA adoption. Third and most important, resolving a hard problem requires multiple disciplines that come from inside and outside your own organization. A spiral is a technique that breaks a hard problem into a series of small activities, each lasting 30-90 days. Each activity, or spiral, produces an answer that moves the hard problem towards resolution.

Lockheed Martin has identified SOA hard problems across six categories: business, engineering, operations, security, governance and skills development. During his talk, Mel shared examples of hard problems within each category, as well as the inter-relationships between hard problems.

Within the engineering category, Mel spoke of altering existing development processes and methodologies for SOA, designing for context awareness, and designing for runtime discovery and composition. In respect to runtime discovery and composition, Lockheed Martin is trying to determine the best way for a running to composition to become aware of newly delivered capability. As an example, Mel called out how the Mars Land Rover continues to receive new capability without returning to earth.

In closing, Mel spoke of impending challenges as third-party services – SaaS, Applications as a Service (APAS), cloud computing, etc – become the new business models. These changes will require support for service-level agreements, real-time monitoring, end-to-end testing, pricing models and service usability.  Mel encouraged attendees to consider these new hard problems in their work as a multi-discipline, cross-industry consortium.

To listen to, or download the audio recording of Mel’s presentation, and view the slides please go here."

[Disclosure: The SOA Consortium is a client of my company, Elemental Links]

Posted by brendamichelson in SOA • SOA_Consortium | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Kenneth G. Brill, executive director of the Uptime Institute, has an eye opening piece in Forbes on the full cost to purchase, house and run cheap ($2,500) servers.  In his work, Brill aggregates facility related server costs that are typically dispersed across several budgets:

"Data-center building depreciation is often carried separately from data-center mechanical and electrical equipment. Utility bills often go to a centralized energy function. Site operation costs for technicians, security staff, power and cooling equipment maintenance, property taxes and other costs are often split between facilities and IT budgets. Nowhere is the total picture consolidated."

What Brill found is that "Annual facility costs will exceed the cost of a "cheap" server in two years in the best case scenario, or 14 months in the worst."  In other words, "Spending $2,500 on a server really means spending between $8,300 and $15,400 in facility capital to provide the necessary space for housing the server and powering it."

Other interesting data points:

"--Just the electricity required to provide power and cooling will exceed the cost of the server in six years. Utility bills virtually never go to IT, and often don't go to facilities either, which inhibits conservation."

"--For an organization with 5,000 servers, the industry rule of thumb is that up to 30% are technologically obsolete. This means that up to 1,500 servers can just be unplugged with no negative impact on data-center production. The savings: $12 million to $23 million recovered in data-center facility capacity, $700,000 in annual electric savings and 6,000 annual tons of reduced greenhouse gas emissions. These savings result merely by telling the "kids" to turn off the "lights" when they leave the room."

Brill then continues by asking what this turns the lights of habit could mean for companies and the economy -- not to mention the environment:

"If we did this on a broad national scale, do we really need to be building all the new data centers, or could we defer a large portion of this investment into the future? Our companies and economy would be far better off if that money went into new application development instead of bricks and mortar!"

While $15k might seem like small money, Brill concludes with an example of a $22 million blade investment that didn't account for facilities in the purchase decision:

"One company's IT department decided to invest $22 million in blade servers but forgot to inform facilities. The facility investment required to merely plug-in the blades was an unplanned $54 million. An additional unplanned $30 million was required to run the blades over three years. So what appeared to be a $22 million decision was really an enterprise decision of over $106 million."

I've only provided some excerpts here.  I think this article is a "must-read" not just for managers and senior IT executives, but for all IT professionals making server line-item requests.  How can you help shift investment dollars from facilities to the delivery of business capability?

Posted by brendamichelson in general IT | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Abbie Lundberg, editor in chief of CIO Magazine, has a great post on Are More CIOs getting Fired, in which she recounts a conversation with Bruce Rogow, IT Consultant, New Paradigm /nGenera contributor, on why previously successful, incumbent CIOs are suddenly finding themselves out of work.  While some of this attrition is 'business as usual' -- retirement, over 5 years in a position -- much is attributed to 'business change'.

The most interesting reason some of the CIOs gave for why they were leaving their positions was that the CEO and/or the business direction had changed, and there was a new sets of expectations for IT. Seventeen or 18 that he talked to said they had been doing a great job (one even faxed over his performance review to prove it), and they didn't see it coming. They were told, simply, that the business needed a different kind of leadership.

So what's going on? According to Rogow, a lot. He said for the first time in five years, the CIOs he's been meeting with have more questions for him than answers. They know that the imperative is for growth, and they have CEOs who understand that IT is the best platform for growth. But they don't know exactly what that means for how they run IT. They want to know: How is this different from what we did in the past? How can we increase IT velocity and dramatically decrease cost at the same time? How can we resegment IT when much of it is based on immediate user demand -- and how do you get requirements out of people who don't necessarily know what they need? How do you ensure security, agility, reliability? If the new approach is chunking, how much do you bite off?

As the post continues, Abbie shares that it's not that incumbent CIOs are missing the boat, but rather how CIOs are responding to the impending business and technology change tsunami:

It's not so much about missing something that might leave without you; it's more like being on the shore knowing there's a tsunami coming. CIOs are aware it's coming, but according to Rogow, they're responding to that awareness in different ways. He presented three scenarios.

1. Some CIOs are trying to do business as usual. All these issues are coming at them, and they're swatting at them like flies. They're tweaking. They think they can tweak their way into the future, but they're wrong. These guys are vulnerable.

2. Others are taking a real objective look at what's coming in the next three to five years -- and they're coming back saying "holy s***." This is not "different circus, same clowns," he said; it's a different circus with different clowns -- different skill sets and different user communities with radically different points of reference and expectations. This group of CIOs is working hard to figure it out.

3. The third response is reactive. New CIOs come in thinking that whatever the last person was doing wasn't right. They know they were brought in to do things differently. Some are good, Rogow says, but some are doing the most ridiculous things -- they come out of the business with no real grounding in IT, get rid of the enterprise architecture group and decide that users should be able to use whatever they want without understanding cause and effect or the consequences of their decisions. This group is the one most likely to really screw things up.

Another wave-crushing scenario I see is CIOs who observe, or are informed, of the imminent wave and respond by undertaking a strategic review to produce a 3 - 5 year plan.  While it's always good to have a long term view, the wave won't freeze-in-place to match a glacier like response.  Organizations need to respond to velocity with velocity, which of course, is not an excuse for recklessness, or obsessive tweaking, but crafting an informed response that includes matching business and IT capability, ridding portfolios of excessive technical debt, and delivering value, early and often.

How is your CIO and organization responding to this tsunami?  Are you experiencing different scenarios?  Will your CIO be a survivor or casualty?  Which should they be? 

Posted by brendamichelson in Business-IT Integration • business • business driven architecture • leadership | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From my post on SOA Consortium Insights:

David Butler, Worldwide SOA Director and Chief Evangelist, HP, kicked off the SOA Consortium’s June meeting in Ottawa with an information-packed presentation on SOA Transformation.

Setting the record straight from the start, David shared “In many respects the SOA market has lost its vision around what SOA is actually trying to do. Not provide a new set of technology, but provide a transformation focused on a design point called a business service. A business service drives measureable business outcome.” David then shared examples of business outcomes from a semiconductor company, a financial services firm and an insurance provider.

David pointed out that successful SOA transformation is more than implementing software. Transformation spans people, organization, process and technology. On the organizational aspect, David called out the criticality of business-IT alignment for proper business service identification and implementation. “…how we map business capabilities in a consumer-provider fashion, and map that into IT systems and technologies. A business person should be able to consume and provide capabilities without knowledge of the underlying technology and platforms, and do that in a changeable manner.”

David shared a 10-point roadmap for SOA transformation, based on customer experience, that covered business service definition, center of excellence, SOA governance, execution architecture and platform, quality and provisioning, service lifecycle, data center operations, IT management processes and line of business engagement.

In closing, David stated, "SOA is a business-oriented architecture". Following his presentation, David engaged in Q&A with the meeting attendees on SOA transformation challenges, including security, business service definition and granularity, service-engineering, service chargeback and economic models, and the changing role of the CIO.

To listen to, or download the audio recording of David’s presentation and view the slides please go here. 

I really liked David's "SOA is a business-oriented architecture" statement.  As I've been saying, SOA is not the underlying technology, SOA is about enabling organizations to create, and adapt to, change. 

[Disclosure: HP is not a client of my company, Elemental Links, but is a founding sponsor of the SOA Consortium, which is an Elemental Links' client.]

Posted by brendamichelson in SOA • SOA_Consortium | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)