Kate's So-Called Second Life: Hunting Butterflies on IBM�. On Saturday at 7AM SLT (also real-time for me) while most sane folks were still lightly snoozing, I was decked out in my goth pantsuit from Silent Sparrow and my butterfly net, roaming around IBM's new SOA island, looking for butterflies that held unique pieces of jewelry from Random Calliope. What?! Exactly.
A butterfly hunt. Random explains it this way .. she had a request to make a piece of butterfly jewelry. But she didn't want to create a "theme piece" without a good reason: There was another idea brewing, however and for that I have spent a lot of time in Caledon just wandering around. Here are a few shots from my morning fun ... Here is Katicus, ready for action.
Look, a butterfly. Some of them were even hidden inside the volcano. I'm pleased to report that in the end, I successfully found two pieces of jewelry. Design Review Checklist for Service Capabilities « Art of Softw. Reasons Your SOA Project is Bound to Fail. Taiichi Ohno Reinterpreted « Thoughts on Collaborative Planning.
Taiichi Ohno is credited with the creation of the Toyota just-in-time production system, and his book “Toyota Production System: Beyond Large Scale Production” is a surprisingly good read even today when many of these principles are considered well established. My interest was in understanding how this philosophy applies to Agile/Lean Software Development. I was pointed this way by Tom and Mary Poppendieck’s excellent book on the same subject, as well as an insightful paper from Fujitsu on the subject of Innovation in Software Development Process by Introducing Toyota Production System (pdf).
As I am reading I am surprised at how perfectly the advice from Mr. Ohno fits to the advice I would give to a software team for Lean/Agile software development Mapping Concepts to Software Before the advice applies, you need to understand how software maps to 20th century automobile manufacturing. For software, the bytes that form the lines of code cost nothing. Quotes from the Book Conclusions. Envisioning BPM Integration Capabilities For Reuse « Art of Sof. If BPM is part of your technology landscape then it sure can be leveraged for success with systematic reuse. Given that objective, what capabilities should the BPM layer provide?
I am not talking about the BPM engine’s core capabilities. I am referring to capabilities that will enable the BPM assets be integrated with your applications, services, and even batch processes. Here is my list. It should: Provide a foundation for hosting business processes that are critical for both revenue generation and operational excellence Provide a modeling and execution environment for designing and implementing business processes. This isn’t all encompassing by any means. SOA Anti-Patterns When Building Services « Art of Software Reu. When building services and service capabilities for your enterprise you have ensure that you have right set of practices to succeed as a service provider. Here are a set of anti-patterns to avoid building enterprise service capabilities as part of your SOA initatives. You can use this as a list of things to watch out for and possibly course correct when/if you recognize them in your teams. Project Focus Only – Service capabilities are being built for projects and their behavior tends to be project-specific.
This myopic view tends to introduce needless tight coupling into your services (making assumptions about client behavior, persistence of state, as well as how the request/response models would be structured etc.). Being too project focused also doesn’t give your firm the opportunity to evaluate existing services, overlapping/redundant functionality. Ad-hoc Reuse - ad-hoc, minimal reuse occurs if you are lucky. Lots of redundant service capabilities being built. The Business Process Management Experience. I was chatting with a few customers that have both WebSphere Process Server and FileNet P8. A very interesting discussion emerged with the enterprise architects - they all want to know how to decide which product to use for which BPM initiative. I said it depends very much on your scenarios. Each product has strengths in addressing certain scenarios: WPS Scenarios If the project you are planning has some of these characteristics, WPS will be a good starting point: Transactional processes that interconnect with the enterprise applications, are short lived, and may not require human interaction.
FileNet Scenarios If the project you are planning has some of these characteristics, IBM FileNet will be a good starting point: Content centric processes that are highly collaborative and require users to make decisions based on documents, images, or other type of content during the processes. Hybrid Scenarios. Elemental links: Join me: Inaugural SOA BPM Symposium, Septembe. Getting Organized for SOA Success « Software Reuse in the Real. There are many organizations – large and small – undertaking SOA initiatives. As much as the technical infrastructure, message processing, service governance, and web service monitoring are important for your SOA you cannot afford to ignore the organizational aspects. In this post, I want to not focus on your entire enterprise but your department or a group of development teams undertaking SOA initiatives. When aspiring for SOA success you have to have more than developers and technical leads on your side.
So who else needs to be involved? You need your requirements analysts, your data modelers, and production support staff all singing the SOA tune albeit in their unique voices. Many developers underestimate the impact of requirements analysts (also referred to as system analysts or business analysts). You want your requirements analysts to specify the business processes the application needs to automate, enhance and the business capabilities required. Loraine Lawson: BPM + SOA = Serious Corporate Cost Cutting Poten. Eric Koch, a CTO who blogs at IT Toolbox, made an intriguing observation on his blog yesterday. He wrote about a recent TechTarget SOA adoption survey which showed integration is the most cited reason for adopting SOA.
But, he noted, the second most-cited reason is Business Process Management. Koch contends that BPM is actually the "next level of maturity from an application perspective" for SOA, after integration. And, really, all three are linked together: This is just the common sense approach to using SOA to improve application integration, thereby reducing maintenance and support costs within IT and reducing duplicate data entry and errors for the end-users.
And using SOA to improve business processes to reduce labor costs and improve productivity is the next step after integration -- end-to-end process automation most often requires integrated systems. Now, I'd already written about the survey's integration findings, but I skipped over the BPM stuff. SOA Pattern of the Week (#4): Service Normalization | SOA World. Like data normalization, the Service Normalization pattern is intent on reducing redundancy and waste in order to avoid the governance burden associated with having to maintain and synchronize similar or duplicate bodies of service logic. " You can see it introduces the Pattern on our publisher page. When designing data architectures, you can easily end up with different databases or even different database tables containing the same or similar data. This has been the root of many well documented data maintenance and quality issues that helped establish data normalization as widely accepted data modeling best practice.
On a fundamental level, the aim of data normalization is to reduce data redundancy to whatever extent possible. Reusability is, of course, also a primary goal of service-orientation. To accomplish this, Service Normalization essentially draws lines in the sand that establish the boundaries of services so that they do not overlap. Building Value Through Business Process Management in a Downturn. Welcome to IT World Canada Since its launch in 1984, IT World Canada has become the online information resource of choice for Canadian IT professionals. For almost three decades IT World Canada has been building solid relationships with Canada’s IT professionals by delivering timely, incisive information that helps them succeed in their jobs. Today, more than 75,000 IT executives and professionals – representing 70 per cent of the buying power in Canada – turn to IT World Canada for the information they trust. Over the past few years, we have transformed our business from a traditional print publisher of the top IT titles in Canada to a multimedia information provider with industry-leading digital titles that include CanadianCIO.com, IT Business.ca, ComputingCanada.com, ComputerDealerNews.com and Directioninformatique.com.
More than any other IT information publisher, we have invested time and effort in getting to know our readers. SOAsocial. Application Platform Strategies Blog: SOA is Dead; Long Live Ser. Blogger: Anne Thomas Manes Obituary: SOA SOA met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession. SOA is survived by its offspring: mashups, BPM, SaaS, Cloud Computing, and all other architectural approaches that depend on “services”. Once thought to be the savior of IT, SOA instead turned into a great failed experiment—at least for most organizations.
SOA was supposed to reduce costs and increase agility on a massive scale. It’s time to accept reality. The demise of SOA is tragic for the IT industry. But perhaps that’s the challenge: The acronym got in the way. Successful SOA (i.e., application re-architecture) requires disruption to the status quo. The latest shiny new technology will not make things better. And that’s where we need to concentrate from this point forward: Services. Ibmtv's Channel. Business Value from SOA - Silo Busting. One of a series of posts exploring the business value from SOA. A common complaint about legacy IT is that it is organized into silos.
This doesn't just affect legacy systems, but it may also affect new projects. In his classic book on the evolution of buildings (How Buildings Learn), Stewart Brand showed how the townscape often lasted longer than the buildings themselves. In an already built-up area, new buildings typically occupied the same footprint as the old building it replaced. The same is often true of new IT systems - the functionality may extend into previously unoccupied areas, but it is more difficult to make radical changes to the boundaries between systems. But if the sponsorship and funding for new IT projects emerges from a host organization, and if the host organization is itself organized into functional silos, then it is hardly surprising when this structure is reflected in IT. There is now a strong pressure within the business world for silo-busting. Greg the Architect. Microsoft adds workflow to cloud-based SOA platform | InfoWorld. Microsoft added this week workflow capabilities to BizTalk Services, the company's platform-in-the-cloud project for SOA and business process management.
The R12 Community Technology Preview for BizTalk Services, the 12th version of the project, offers workflow enabling service orchestration from the cloud. These services can connect to enterprise systems or to systems running anywhere on the Internet. Featured in R12 are a hosted Windows Workflow Foundation runtime and Web services messaging.
Users could, for example, set up an automated process that uses Web services to provide pricing information to a partner, said Steven Martin, senior director of product management for the Microsoft Connected Systems Division. "The workflow technology allows me to define the interaction between those services," he said. "As more customers are rolling out SOA in their organizations, the need to define the [interactions] of the services that traverse the firewall is very important," Martin said. Study: Only one out of five SOA efforts bearing fruit | Service- SearchSOA's Michael Meehan reported on the latest findings coming out of the recent Burton Group confab, and things aren't looking pretty for SOA.
And it may even take outside intervention to set an SOA back on track. 'Many SOA attempts amount only to a less efficient method of doing EAI.' Ouch. Anne Thomas Manes, who delivered the bad news (followed by some good news), said that the consultancy's in-depth study of 20 companies found a "50% complete failure rate," while another "30% were considered neither successful nor wholly failed.
" Yikes -- what's going on here? As Anne put it: "Many of them had deployed multiple successful projects, but most of those projects were focused on just one integration problem," Manes said. She added that such JBOWS projects amount only to a less efficient method of doing enterprise application integration, or EAI. Don't blame the implementers, though. What about that 20% (presumably four companies) that saw success with SOA? Business Process Management with SOA, Part 4: Monitoring IBM Fil.
Introduction Part 3 of this series showed you how to create and deploy a BPM solution that can run on both WebSphere Process Server (Process Server) and FileNet P8. Using standard Web services techniques, a Process Server process can invoke a FileNet process seamlessly, and use the FileNet content engine to create, manage, and store documents or business objects that are associated with a business process. In Part 4, you'll learn how to use WebSphere Business Monitor V6.1 (Monitor) to monitor a business process that runs on both Process Server and FileNet. We'll describe the overall topology, how events are emitted from both platforms, and show you how to correlate them by authoring a monitor model. How it works Figure 1 shows a view of the overall architecture.
A monitor model correlates events coming from the multiple sources. The Monitor database contains meaningful metrics aggregated by the monitor models deployed on the Monitor server. Figure 1. Setting up the environment Figure 2. SOA What? Why doesn't anyone understand SOA? If you read the numerous technology blogs daily like I do, you soon realize that most people still don't understand SOA. Today I read this article from Joe McKendrick called Why even the best SOAs are stalling. In this article Joe discusses an article by Anne Thomas Manes where she discusses how she has only come across one company that has realized any value from SOA. In her article she referred to an article from Ron Schmezler at Zapthink called Why Service Consumers and service providers should never directly communicate.
Apparently this article caused all kinds of heated debate on the message boards. ....this technology discussion is irrelevant.....It has become clear to me that SOA is not working in most organizations. So why are so many organization struggling with SOA? Business ValueThe business gets value when SOA is used as an enabler of BPM. IT ValueThe value for IT is in reuse and speed to market. SOA strategy and execution is failing in many companies. » 12 predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2008 | Enterprise Web.