deltalounge

The session I presented at the SOA Symposium 2010 is now available online via InfoQ. You can find it as a Service Bus case study. It is introduced as:

a case study of using a service bus in a supply channel connecting a wholesale supplier with hundreds of retailers, the overall context and challenges faced – including the integration of POS software coming from different software providers-, the solution chosen and its implementation, how it worked out and the lessons learned along the way.

Watch the video, download the mp3 or sheets.

This year, in partnership with InfoQ.com (the largest community site for technical architects), 1/4th of the SOA Symposium sessions was filmed and will be published on InfoQ. From early November InfoQ has started publishing these videos. At the time of writing the following videos are available:

• Cloudy SOA
• BPM Top Seven Architectural Topics in 2010
• Resurrecting SOA

Cloudy SOA

This session on Cloudy SOA by Mark Little covers:

an introduction to cloud computing pointing to the fact that the middleware needs of the cloud are similar to SOA’s, showing some of the benefits of running SOA along with the cloud, asking if cloud computing and SOA should evolve together and giving some future directions to consider.

BPM Top Seven Architectural Topics in 2010

Hanjo Normann’s session presenting the BPM Top Seven Architectural Topics in 2010 covers:

how to design a BPM/SOA solution including: modeling human interaction, improving BPM models, orchestrating composed services, central task management, new approaches for business-IT alignment, solutions for non-deterministic processes, and choreography.

Resurrecting SOA

Anne Thomas Manes in her Resurrecting SOA session goes into details on why she:

believes organizations need SOA more than before, but using a redefined SOA based on the SOA Manifesto, focusing on models, methodologies and patterns, not on technology, intended to produce the desired business and technical goals.

For a complete overview of SOA Symposium sessions on InfoQ check their SOA Symposium page.

This blog will point you to two valuable but free resources:

Designing the Service Contract

You can download a free PDF on Designing the Service Contract (alternative link). This is a sample chapter from the book Oracle SOA Suite Developer’s Guide. The book is available form here.
There are also two OTN Arch2Arch Podcast interviews with Oracle SOA Suite Developer’s Guide authors Matt Wright and Antony Reynolds now available:

• The architects perspective
• SOA around the globe and important books

Developing a Portlet using ADF

There is a free sample chapter on how to create Portlets using ADF available (alternative link). The chapter is taken from Web 2.0 solutions with Oracle WebCenter 11g. The book is available here.

In this chapter, you will learn the following:

• JSF specification concepts
• The types of portlets you can build with WebCenter
• Developing a portlet using ADF
• Integrating portlets with custom Applications

So here is my presentation from the SOA Symposium 2010. Hope you enjoy it:

SOA Cloud Symposium 2011

The SOA Cloud Symposium 2011 logo has just been released. In 2011 the SOA Symposium will be held on April 27 and 28 in Brasilia the capital of Brasil.

Most discussions on Cloud Computing I’ve been reading are focused on the infrastructure and technology part. It offers easy to deploy infrastructures or even applications in a very scalable way. All this in a pay-per-* way. And here is where a CFO should get interested. Moving to a Cloud implies moving from CAPEX to OPEX. Usually a CFO has an idea on how to keep these balanced. The Enterprise Architecture of some organizations even have very strict guidelines on whether certain expenses should the one or the other. So that’s the first one to thing about…

As was stated in a previous blogpost on measuring the business value of SOA, project metrics for business value created by SOA projects, IT projects, or even projects in general are rare. If I were a CFO this would worry me.
Besides that SOA efforts in a way also demand a different way of cost accounting than the traditional silo based. If my organizational unit owned (and had to account for the costs) of a rather popular often reused service, I would like to charge them. Say for example in a pay-per-service-call way. How do the financial systems under the responsibility of the CFO facilitate this?

Of course there will be lots of other stuff on your agenda if you are the CFO. But hey due to the crisis interest rates are low, labor is cheap, as are materials, so why not invest now in the foundation/infrastructure for the future
If you’re a CFO and – by incident – are reading this blogpost please let me know what you think, and add a comment…

As Anne Thomas Manes stated in her presentation on Measuring the Business Value of SOA a 2009 Gartner study showed that

• 36% of SOA projects lack a business justification
• 1% of all SOA efforts actually measured benefits

From these statistics it doesn’t seem to be a natural thing to do, measuring the business value of SOA. By measuring the business values we mean value in monetary terms – “hard cash”. Think in terms like:

• Increased revenue
• Lower costs
• Better use of assets
• Solve customer business needs

In order to have a good assessment of these we need a solid baseline measurement. This is where it gets hard. How many organizations actually have baselines like these. So the intricacies of measuring the business value of SOA aren’t necessarily related to SOA! It might very well be an issue for IT or even businesses in general.

What is specific for SOA or any other architecture or maybe project management approach, is to single out SOA as the direct responsible mechanism for the business value created (causality). In other words what part is SOA specific and what is “just” the availability of a new application? SOA has an indirect impact on business outcomes.
As an example of the previous point: In one of the SOA efforts that I have been involved in – that was at least in my opinion successful – the realization of the business case was very clear: 5 to 10 employees of a department had no longer work to do after 11.00 am. However because we automated a process that wasn’t automated before, it would be very hard for me to point out what part of the savings was actually directly caused by implementing in an SOA context.

This is one of the reasons why I’ve been advising organizations to implement SOA as part of their “normal” projects, or at least projects with a valid business case. Dealing with your project in a SOA way will not only deliver the monetary outcome described in the business case. Applying SOA principles like “Separation of concerns” and “Loose Coupling” will yield in solutions that are modular, interoperable, and shareable.

The agenda for the SOA Symposium 2010 has been posted. Again there are very interesting sessions during this 2 day conference. The largest and most comprehensive in the field of SOA and Cloud Computing. The Real World SOA Case Studies track offers a great opportunity to learn from the experience of others. In this track you will find:

Real-life accounts of successful and failed SOA projects discussed first-hand by those that experienced the project lifecycles and have a story to tell. These veteran practitioners will provide advice and insights regarding challenges, pitfalls, proven practices, and general project information that demonstrates the intricacies of implementing and governing service-oriented solutions in the real world.

I will be presenting the first session in this track on Using a Service Bus to Connect the Supply Chain. If you have any topics or questions in advance that you think I should address, please post them in the comments. Hope to meet you in Berlin.

Although I didn’t attend the Burton Group Catalyst Conference in Prague this week, I was able to get a glimpse using twitter and some blogs. My main focus was on the Life after SOA: Next Generation Application Architecture track. In this post I’ll share some quotes and thoughts with you.

SOA Governance

On governance I like this quote from Anne Thomas Manes:

If you can’t manage and govern your services with a wiki, a registry/repository won’t help you, either.

This goes great with the statement that I’ve put on this blog before that it is not about the tool it is about people and process. Besides that managing a Service Repository also isn’t a Silver Bullet either, it has proven to be very useful for some of our customers.

BPM

Here are some quotes from Mike Rollings on BPM:

Too much focus on business process automation is detrimental to your BPM initiative.

Automation helps reduce human effort, but fixating on automation gets in the way of optimizing the business.

Automation can be an enabler for optimization, however it should never get in it’s way of become some kind of burden. Yes software can help, but software is a means to (process) optimization not an end or a goal.

So far, I am not sure where I stand on the following quote from Anne Thomas Manes:

BPM infrastructure tools: process modeling tool is key. But models are not to be created to generate code.

On one side I’ve worked with tools that generate good code from models. At the same time I’ve worked with analyst and other functional people that do not have the skills to create a model that will result in great software. Please share your thoughts on the subject in the comments!

On October 5 and 6 2010 the worlds largest SOA and Cloud Computing event will be held in Berlin; the SOA Symposium. The International SOA and Cloud Symposium brings together lessons learned and emerging topics from SOA and Cloud projects, practitioners and experts.

There is a call for presentations:

The SOA and Cloud Symposium 2010 program committees invite submissions on all topics related to SOA and Cloud, including but not limited to those listed in the preceding track descriptions. While contributions from consultants and vendors are appreciated, product demonstrations or vendor showcases will not be accepted.

All submissions must be received no later than June 30, 2010. An overview of the tracks can be found here. Other resources:

• My blogpost of the SOA Symposium 2009.
• Presentations from 2009.

After once again looking for good, useful definitions of Services and Process decided to put them here for future reference.

Service Orientation – Paul Allen

The following definitions come from Service Orientation: Winning Strategies and Best Practices by Paul Allen.

A service is functionality that must be specified in the business context and in terms of the contracts between the provider of that functionality and its consumers. Implementation details should not be revealed. The implementation of the service does not have to be automated – it could consist of purely human activity.

A business process is a set of activities that is initiated by an event, transforms information or materials, and produces an output. These sets of activities are either value chains that produce outputs valued by customers or infrastructure processes that produce outputs that are valued by other processes.

With the remark that “a business process is usefully pictured as being composed of re-configurable services”.

A software service is a type of service that is implemented by software and that offers one or more operations (or software functuions).

Web services technology is a set of XML-based industry standards and specifications that specify a communication protocol (SOAP), a definition language (WSDL), and a publish-subscribe registry (UDDI).

Succeeding with SOA and Implementing SOA – Paul C. Brown

The following definitions were taken from Succeeding with SOA by Paul C. Brown. Who also wrote Implementing SOA.

A service is a unit of functionality packaged for convenience and consistent use.

With the remark that typically, this functionality consists of a body of information and a set of operations for managing this information.

A business process is a structured set of activities organized to produce results.

A process, or more specifically a discrete process, is a sequence of distinct activities that produces (or attempts to produce) discrete countable results.

An activity is a function performed by one or more agents that uses on or more inputs and produces one or more results.

SOA Design Patterns- Thomas Erl

This post could simply not exist without quotes from Thomas Erl. A complete list of his books in the Service-Oriented Computing series can be found on soabooks.com.

Services are collections of capabilities. A Service is a unit of solution logic to which service-orientation has been applied to a meaningful extent.

Services exist as physically independent software programs with specific design characteristics that support the attainment of the strategic goals associated with service-oriented computing.

A Web service is a body of solution logic that provides a physically decoupled technical contract consiting of a WSDL definition and one or more XML Schema definitions and possible WS-Policy expressions

In a Web service Capabilities are exposed as operations.