Todd Biske: Outside the Box

Archive for the ‘Conferences’ Category

I’m in the keynote for the Gartner Application Architecture, Development, and Integration Summit. So far, the biggest thing that the panelists have mentioned is this overlay on the traditional Gartner hype cycle which defines things as in the “Zone of Competitive Leadership (ZCL),” the “Zone of the Mainstream (ZM),” and the “Zone of the Decline (ZD).” If not apparent, things that are in the ZCL are higher risk but higher reward. Things that are in the ZM are necessary for companies to adopt to simply keep up with their competitors. Things that are in ZD are for the most risk averse. Yefim Natis put Client-Server architectures in the Zone of Decline, as an example.Yefim also called out that this coming year, “Interactive” SOA (which is Gartner’s “traditional” SOA) will move into the Zone of the Mainstream. I’ll have to go back and look up what their definition of interactive SOA is, but unless it’s just the standard integration-based approach to building the same old solutions, I’d be hesitant to say that SOA is mainstream. Using services where we were previously using EJBs or other distributed components clearly is mainstream at this point, but until we see more projects that are strictly about building services and a separation between the construction of consumers and the construction of services, I think we’re still in the ZCL.Yefim also talked about other types of SOA, including Event-Driven SOA, WOA, and Context-based SOA, which he’ll cover in a later session. There was then some brief discussion about the SOA platform, and now we’ve moved onto a discussion from Gene Phifer about Web 2.0, Cloud Computing, Computing as a Service, Social Networking, etc. It’s nice to hear them giving a decent amount of attention to this. Nothing new in the quick overview, but keynote-level attention is a good thing.Finally, Matthew Hotle is wrapping up with a discussion about governance. They’re emphasizing a very lightweight approach, with just enough decision support to ensure that the organization can still be agile. There’s a session on their Maturity Assessment for Application Development later in the day that I plan on attending. From what they showed in the keynote, it’s a five level maturity approach that sounds very similar to what I’ve discussed in the past (here, here).More to come from the conference, I hope to be blogging throughout.

Just a reminder, I’ll be part of two panel discussions in Las Vegas next week, the first at the Gartner Application Architecture, Development, and Integration Summit on Tuesday morning, the second at the Gartner Enterprise Architecture Summit on Wednesday afternoon. If you’re attending and want to chat or simply introduce yourself, stop by or drop me a line at todd at biske dot com.

I’ll be part of two panel discussions at the upcoming Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration and Enterprise Architecture Summits. These are being held at the Rio Casino and Conference Center in Las Vegas the week of Dec. 3-7. In the App Arch summit, I’ll be part of a Power Breakfast discussing funding SOA on Tuesday morning at 7:30 am. In the EA summit, I’ll be part of a panel discussion jointly moderated by Gartner and The SOA Consortium discussing the relationship between EA and SOA on Wednesday at 3:30 pm.  I’ll be at the two summits from beginning to end (Monday – Friday), so feel free to find me and say hi.  One of the more enjoyable parts of these conferences for me is the networking opportunities.

In his daily links post for the 21st, James McGovern made mention of SOA India 2007 and suggested that they should have gotten me as a speaker. For the record, I was invited to speak at SOA India, but I had one major reason to decline. The conference is over Thanksgiving here in the USA. More so than any other holiday, families get together for Thanksgiving and mine is no exception. I certainly appreciated the invitation, however.

On a slightly related note, in the future these conferences should look to technology to bring in speakers. Flying is expensive, and there aren’t too many conferences that are willing to pay all of the expenses of their speakers. I would have no issue, however, with doing a video conference. While it’s not quite the same as seeing the actual person there, it’s got to be better than not getting speakers at all due to the travel involved.

I was a panelist for a discussion on the Future of SOA at The Open Group Enterprise Architecture Practitioner’s Conference in late July. The session was recorded and is now available as a podcast from Dana Gardner’s BriefingsDirect page. Please feel free to followup with me on any questions you may have after listening to it.

Andres Carvallo is the CIO for Austin Energy. He was just speaking on how the Internet has changed the power industry. He brought up the point that we’ve all experienced, where we must call our local power company to tell them that the power is out. Take this in contrast to the things you can do with package delivery via the Internet, and it shows how the Internet age is changing customer expectations. While he didn’t go into this, my first reaction to this was that IT is much like the power company. It’s all too often that we only know a system is down because an end user has told us so.

This leads to discussion of something that is all too frequently overlooked, which is the management of our solutions. Visibility into what’s going on is all too often an afterthought. If you exclusively focus on outages, you’re missing the point. Yes, we do want to know when the .001% of downtime occurs. What makes things more important, however, is an understanding of what’s going on the other 99.999% of the time. It’s better to refer this as visibility rather than monitoring, because monitoring leads to narrow thinking around outages, rather than on the broader information set.

Keeping with the theme of the power industry, clearly, Austin Energy needs to deal with the varying demands of the consumers of their product. That may range from some of the major technology players in the Austin area versus your typical residential customer. Certainly, all consumers are not created equal. Think about the management infrastructure that must be in place to understand these different consumers. Do you have the same level of management in your IT solutions to understand different consumers of your services?

This is a very interesting discussion, especially given today’s context of HP’s acquisition of Opsware (InfoWorld report, commentary/analysis from Dana Gardner and Tony Baer).

Joe Hill from EDS is on the stage now. The title of his talk is on SOA and Outsourcing, although it’s far more broad than just an outsourcing discussion. It would be nice to have a copy of his slides, as he had some really good ways of visualizing SOA adoption along a timeline and the differences on how it should be approached. For example, using a chart reminiscent of Clayton Christensen’s “The Innovator’s Solution”, he showed that at the early phases where we have “performance undersupply,” the typical solution may need to be more tightly coupled, fewer vendors, and more use of proprietary techniques. The discussion around SOA is typically on the right hand side of the chart, emphasizing loose coupling, multiple vendors, open standards, etc. The problem that I felt Joe was emphasizing was that you need to recognize where you are and apply the right techniques at the right time, rather than on focusing too heavily on the end state on the right hand side of the diagram.

Rob High of IBM is on the stage now with a presentation titled “SOA Foundation” which runs the gamut of topics associated with SOA. One thing he took a lot of time to discuss was the notion of coherency and the importance of semantics to SOA. It was nice to hear some emphasis on this point, as I believe that an understanding of the semantics is a critical component in moving from SOA applied to applications to SOA applied to the enterprise. Just as with the rest of SOA, make sure you understand the semantics first before throwing any semantic technology at it. While there are evolving specs and tools in this space, none of that will do you any good if don’t first understand the semantics themselves and how that information can be leveraged in your project efforts.

I’m here at The Open Group Enterprise Architecture Practitioner’s Conference, and will try to blog where I can on the presentations. Right now, I’m sitting in David Linthicum’s keynote, which is on EA & SOA. He had an interesting quote, which was:

Five years from now, we won’t be talking about SOA… It will all be folded back into EA.

There’s some truth to this, but there’s also a lot of risk. One of the issues with EA (and many other efforts within IT), is that it can become disconnected from the project efforts that are going on. The term most frequently used with this is “ivory tower” where enterprise architects are simply viewed as paper pushers that know how to create a lot of PowerPoint slides. One of the side benefits of SOA is that it relates very well to the world of the development projects, with “service” being the point of common language. The enterprise architects may be modeling the enterprise in terms of the services that are needed, and projects can now utilize these models in their project architecture. This is easier said than done, however, as you need to ensure that the reference material containing these models (e.g. a reference architecture) is consumable at the project level. If the only group that can understand your models are fellow enterprise architects, that’s a problem.

So, will SOA be folded into EA as a whole? If EA can ensure that the artifacts it creates are consumable at the project level, then absolutely, SOA will be folded into EA. If EA is not creating artifacts that are consumable at the project level, then we have a problem. You’ll likely still have tension between EA and SOA, and likely not achieve the levels of success that organizations that have successfully bridged the world of EA and the project space. This doesn’t apply solely to SOA. This applies equally to any architectural domain. You may have information architects working on canonical or enterprise data models, performing data quality analysis, etc., but if it doesn’t find a way to become relevant to project efforts, it will exist on an island with continual struggles to achieve the objectives that were set out.