Todd Biske: Outside the Box

Miko Matsumura recently posted about the myth of starting small which was followed up by a response from Joe McKendrick of ZDNet.

Miko stated that the only ones getting it right were ZapThink, who state that “the things you do in a pilot are the exact opposite of what you need to do to get to enterprise scale.” For the record, I agree. This all comes down to defining the pilot properly. In their book, “Service Orient or Be Doomed!” Jason and Ron call out three SOA Pilot essentials: an architectural plan (the pilot will cover some portion of it), a specific scope, and clear acceptance criteria.

There shouldn’t be much controversy over these, but yet, the case studies and whitepapers that I see presented don’t have these elements, and it’s usually because the study is equating web services usage with SOA. Taking a user-facing customer portal and extending it by allowing customers to integrate their systems directly can be a good thing, but is it really an SOA pilot?

One of the key things, in my opinion, in a proper SOA pilot is to pick a problem that will require the organization to see the cultural changes that are necessary to become a service provider. In the portal case, the group maintaining the portal is already a service provider, so there’s no big stretch there. Instead, we need to find a service that has potential for reuse, and has no clear owner in the current organization structure. This scenario will give a good dose of what SOA is all about from an IT perspective. If you’re using the pilot to sell SOA to the business, you’ve got to be even more careful in your selection, especially in picking the right service consumers. Agility is a particularly difficult thing to pilot, because it only becomes evident when something needs to change. If a pilot is putting it in place for the first time, there’s no change involved. What can help pick the right pilot? The architectural plan. If the architectural plan isn’t already service-oriented, however, what do you do?

My advice is to first focus on why you’re doing the pilot, and what you hope to achieve/prove. If IT begins to understand what being a service-provider means (you need to have a pilot that have distinct service consumers and providers to do this), it is progress, even if the service isn’t as coarse-grained as it should be or can be used as a good case for business justification. It may not be SOA yet, but it is a step in right direction. Once you understand how the IT organization needs to change, now you can pick a service with a bit more impact that really can show the business that IT has its act together and can make a difference.

3 Responses to “SOA Pilot”