Todd Biske: Outside the Box

Full disclosure: I’m attending Oracle OpenWorld courtesy of Oracle.

I’m having to recreate this post thanks to a bug in WordPress for the iPhone which managed to eat a couple posts, so my apologies for it being a bit shorter than hoped, since I had to recall what I was typing live.

In this talk, Vikas Jain gave an overview of Oracle Web Services Manager, and Josh Bregman (I think) gave a demo of integration between Oracle Web Services Manager (OWSM) and Oracle Entitlements Server (OES). For most of his portion, Vikas went over the architecture behind WSM. It hasn’t changed too dramatically since I first saw it back as Confluent years ago, and that’s a good thing, since it had proper separation between policy enforcement and policy management. One thing I didn’t know, which is a good thing, is that the WSM enforcement point is now an embedded agent within WebLogic Server. That is, it comes with WebLogic server, there’s no separate install for it. This is a very important point, because if you need to do end-to-end identity propagation, you’ll need some kind of agent or native support for your identity formats on every node in the call chain. They did mention E2E identity propagation on a slide, but they didn’t go into any depth on it.

From a feature standpoint, OWSM has all of the necessary WS-* features necessary, including WS-Policy, WS-Security, SAML support, and WS-ReliableMessaging to name a few.

One thing I was disappointed with is when they presented a slide on integrations with the rest of the fusion middleware, Oracle Service Bus was not shown. SOA and WebLogic was a line item, and since OSB runs on WebLogic, it could be inferred that there’s a relationship, but what I wanted to know about was the significant functionality overlap between OSB and OWSM. I did get to ask about this, and the first answer was that they felt there wasn’t a lot of overlap, and frankly, I don’t agree with that in the slightest. On the plus side, however, they did say that in a future release of Oracle Service Bus, the security features of OSB will be fully provided by the OWSM agent, and not by the underlying WebLogic (non-OWSM) capabilities as is currently done. If this is the case, then they are working to eliminate the functional overlap, however, there’s a long way to go. Oracle Service Bus is a policy enforcement point, just as Oracle Web Service Manager agents are. OWSM can do more than just security, just as OSB can. Hopefully, this will be resolved in the future, and customers will not have to choose between two products from the same vendor to attack the same problem of enforcing service contract policies through a service intermediary.

Full disclosure: I’m attending Oracle OpenWorld courtesy of Oracle.

Michael Dell started by presenting some facts: $1.2 trillion dollars spent annually on IT infrastructure. $400 billion on hardware/software, $800 billion on labor and services. The dilemma is that we spend 70% on keeping the lights on, and only 30% on innovation. The desire is to flip that balance (same message that Ann Livermore of HP delivered yesterday). Dell is making a commitment to taking $200 billion out of the $1.2 trillion spend by enabling the efficient enterprise through: standardization, simplification, and automation.

On standardization, Michael discussed the role of x86 hardware and that today, 90% of all business applications are running on x86 hardware. According to Dell’s calculations, databases run up to 200% better on x86 systems than on proprietary hardware. Oracle and Dell are committed to making the technology work harder, not the user.

Moving on to simplification… the theme is pragmatic consolidation. He talked about Dell’s tiered storage capabilities, including iSCSI, solid state disks, and 10 gigabit ethernet. Similar to the opening keynote, he stated that 20x performance gains are possible with solid state storage technology. He then moved onto virtualization, giving examples of 20:1 server consolidation, 50% operational savings, and 1/3 of IT resources freed up for other efforts.

Full disclosure: I am attending Oracle OpenWorld courtesy of Oracle.

The speaker is Dirk Stähler from Opitz Consulting And he is talking about how to bridge the information gap using Oracle BPA Suite and an integrated model.

He started by presenting the EA, BPM, and SOA problem which includes no unified methodology, unclear semantics, and no differentiation between EA, BPM, and SOA aspects.

He presented the three domains in a Venn diagram and called out the overlap in artifacts from each, including org structure, infrastructure, business processes, IT systems, and business objects. This overlap forms the foundation for the metamodel which can be captured in Oracle’s BPA suite.

In discussing this, he presented a pyramid, where EA is at the top (providing a conceptual blueprint of the org), underneath that is business process management (as a business design tool), then comes technical business process management (for IT specifications), and finally is information technology (supporting development). SOA spans one leg of the pyramid, impacting all four layers.

In discussing the artifacts, he defined domains for process architecture, application architecture, infrastructure architecture, data architecture, organziation architecture, and service architecture. All of the artifacts can be captured in BPA suite. In aligning this to EA, BPM, and SOA, he feels that EA covers app and infrastructure architecture, BPM covers organization, process, and data, and SOA covers service and some of data.

After this, he switched to a demo of the BPA suite, showing how to navigate the metamodel, associate different diagram types with different domains, etc. As someone with no experience with BPA suite or any other EA tooling, this was a good overview of how BPA suite could be used to manage the various models associated with an EA practice. The metamodel description covered how to separate these things within BPA suite, however the talk did not get into any issues or concerns with having two or even three different audiences using one centralized tool and repository, making sure they leverage each other’s work where appropriate.

For more information, they have published a book on their methodology, however it is currently only available in german.

Full disclosure: I’m attending Oracle OpenWorld courtesy of Oracle.

Thomas started off with an overview of the “red” stack (my words, not his) and the major releases that have occurred this year. He’s starting with a video from a fictional company called Avitek discussing the importance of user experience. Ted Farrell then came on stage to demonstrate advances in Siebel CRM and Oracle Fusion in the UI layer. He showed a UI feature he called “carousel” which looked strikingly like CoverFlow in iTunes, some use of JavaFX, mapping technologies, live chat, and more. They demonstrated integration between Siebel CRM and Oracle e-Business Suite (EBS). This continues with the theme yesterday of top to bottom integration.

After the next video, Thomas is now talking about BPM and has David Shaffer on stage to discuss Fusion Middleware and applications. He started with an ADF application on his iPhone showing him an alert, and then went to the Oracle BPM worklist that shows the task required, moving into a visual representation of the flow required. From there, they were able to determine that they needed to go into EBS to remediate the problem. This demo was a bit too canned for me. The process flow shown looked like something a developer should be looking at, not something someone in a support center would be using. David then moved on to show the Oracle Business Process Composer and its support for BPMN 2.0. From there, a composite service could be drilled into, going straight into JDeveloper. Seeing these demos definitely shows me why Oracle’s JDeveloper strategy makes sense, even though it can be frustrating for organizations that only use Oracle middleware, and not Oracle applications. To properly support development and integration with Oracle apps, a very powerful development environment with integration into design-time metadata systems is necessary.

The demos continued with Ingersoll Rand coming on stage for a demo of Oracle BI and its integration with EBS. After that, they moved on to governance, controls, and security. Norm Fjeldheim, CIO of Qualcomm, and Steve Miranda came on stage for the next demo. Through integration with EBS, they demoed how areas of risk can be shown and addressed via Oracle GRC. Next up was scalability and high availability, and the demo started with Oracle Enterprise Manager. Enterprise Manager is being used to show the end-to-end view, highlight hot spots, link to management consoles of WebLogic, etc., and take action to fix. It continued on with operational management (there was a LOT in this keynote). This includes real end user experience, correlation between business and system monitoring, and root cause identification. Marshall Lew from Office Depot came on stage to assist in this demo. I wasn’t aware that Oracle played in the operational management space, so this was new to me. It’s all built from their Enterprise Manager product. If your infrastructure stack is red, this is a nice centralized management system.

Full disclosure: I’m attending Oracle OpenWorld courtesy of Oracle.

I was late to this session as my panel preceeded it, and the questions continued for a good 30 minutes after the session ended. Thank you to all who attended, and the positive feedback was great.

The speaker went over the basics of Oracle’s CEP platform, introducing the query language they use for event streams (CQL). No surprises in terms of the approach, it looks like other CEP’s I’ve seen. They emphasized the role that Coherence plays in the scalability of the platform. I do like the use of Coherence as a common platform across all of their middleware products, it makes a lot of sense.

They went on to present a demo of CEP in action, where the CEP was processing location based events associated with emergency responders. One thing they didn’t call out is the need for some system to make the decision to actually publish events. In my opinion, this is one of the key things holding back adoption of things like CEP. The average app developer working on a web-based transactional system just doesn’t think about publishing events unless they have some concrete consumer of those events. Just as we may not know all consumers of a service, we may not know all consumers of events. Would the developer on this system really know to be publishing source locations associated with connectivity or message traffic in advance? Initially, we’ll need to simply leverage message flows that are already occurring, similar to an intrusion detection systems to extract information that should be events, but instead are embedded in some other message. This creates a need for standard headers and message bodies to allow the CEP engine to have something consistent to query against.

Consistent with my previous posts on CEP, it looks like great technology, but the definition of problems where it is best applied are still evolving and maturing.

Full disclosure: I’m attending Oracle OpenWorld courtesy of Oracle.

Speakers:

• Mark Salser, Senior VP, Enterprise Solutions Group
• Mark Dickson, Systems Architect, Cochlear Americas
• Edward Screven, Chief Corporate Architect, Oracle
• Paul Cross, Group Vice President: Sales Consulting, Oracle

Quotes from Mark’s intro: “Why has Enterprise Architecture become more important? The issues are moving more toward enterprise level issues … Think about enterprise architecture as a strategy for your business. It is a strategy for how you bring business and IT together and requires a holistic view of the business. … Ultimately you want to create a collection of prescriptive guidance … that takes you down this path of operational excellence.” Five key points on slide: rationalize, standardize, consolidate, optimize, and innovate. “Enterprise Architecture is about establishing the foundation for an optimized IT core.” On the slide, it emphasizes that this foundation is based on architectural principles, best practices and reference architectures, industry and corporate standards, technology trends, and a rationalized IT portfolio, with a business model, strategy, and objectives at the center.

There’s a slide up now that shows a simple view of what they consider to be the core. It has the standard three tier view of user interaction at the top, application services in the middle, and a technology foundation at the bottom. In between the user interaction and the application services layers is a composite business process layer.

After a slight detour for an interview with Edward Screven, Oracle’s Chief Corporate Architecture, they are getting back to a framework (hopefully). They presented some typical guiding principles for EA, and then split EA up into three areas: people, process & framework (architecture development process, EA framework), and portfolio (Oracle Enterprise Architecture Repository, Services and Products).

The Oracle Architecture Development Process looks very TOGAF like, the Oracle Enterprise Architecture Framework consists of business architecture, application architecture, information architecture, and technology architecture, with people, processes, and tools on one vertical and EA governance on the other vertical. Underneath it all is an EA repository.

The EA repository consists of best practice reference architectures and patterns from their own practices and customer practices. They are encouraging us to use this as a jumpstart. They’re showing a number of models from the repository (very quickly, unfortunately), but there’s some very good information there. Unfortunately, I asked if those models are publicly available and they are not. An engagement with EA Professional Services is not required, as there are architects from the team that participate on Oracle Mix, and they can make information from the repository available in direct response to the public discussion. Hopefully, Oracle will see this post and establish a process to publish some of these models via ITN on a regular basis rather than keeping them hidden until requested. While I understand the need to keep a certain amount of intellectual property private in support of a consulting practice, there is still some basic reference architecture information that should be available simply for being an Oracle customer that we can pull ourselves in support of our own EA efforts.

Full disclosure: I am attending Oracle OpenWorld courtesy of Oracle.

This was a session focused on BPM 11g. It’s a bit of a whirlwind overview, but so far they have emphasized the use of BPMN 2.0, Business Rules integration, SCA, and the new rich form designer.

Next up is the BPA suite based on their OEM relationship with IDS Scheer ARIS. 11g introduces round trip integration with BPM Studio and a unified repository with IDS products, etc. I haven’t heard anything about Oracle ER becoming a centralized metadata repository for all Oracle products, which a find a bit surprising. It could just be that I’m in the wrong sessions, but more and more, I believe a common repository is going to be a critical component.

The presenters went on to talk about process portals, including a collaborative modeling portal, a work space model (a context specific portal for one or more related processes) and an instance-specific view (for tracking events, dealines, etc. about a specific instance of a process).

The next topic discussed was dynamic BPM. This included rule driven processes, rule driven data validation, dynamic service binding, and rule driven task management. Clearly, the theme here is integration with a rules engine and having the ability to modify the rules which will change how the process gets executes, while not requiring a redeployment of the process itself.

They have also made changes to the human workflow component to better support for unstructured processes. The technique described makes sense, but this feels like a “show me” category. Getting users to use the tooling to dynamically add new process participants and steps sounds great, but there may be some big cultural hurdles to overcome to make this useful.

They then went over enhancement to process instrumentation and business activity monitoring, including real time publishing of process metrics to BAM. They also can feed Oracle’s CEP engine for dynamic processing based on incoming metrics and events.

Overall, the message is that Oracle has a comprehensive and unified BPM platform. From the slides, it certainly appears comprehensive. The 11g release is all about unification onto a common platform, and as long as what’s been on the slides accurately reflects this new platform, 11g should be a good step forward for Oracle BPM.

Full disclosure: I’m attending Oracle OpenWorld courtesy of Oracle.

First wave of industry standardization was around functional-specific standards in areas causing headaches in the integration space. Emphasizing the role of SCA in the standardization of the service platform in the same way that Java EE played a role in the evolution of the application server. I’ll be honest, I’m still not a big SCA fan. I know Oracle is, though. The one good thing being shown is that the hosting environments can be managed in a single, unified way, regardless of whether that service is hosted in BPEL PM or WebLogic. As long as there’s good tooling that hides of the various SCA descriptors, this is a good thing.

Now they are talking about the event delivery network. It’s nice to see a discussion on fundamentals rather than trying to jump into a CEP discussion. They’re talking about having an event catalog, utilizing an EDL (event description language), and easily connecting consumers and subscribers. This is a good step forward, in my opinion. It may actually get people to think about events as first class citizens in the same way as services.

Now, they’re on to Oracle Human Workflow. It is all task-based, with property-based configuration. The routing of tasks can be entirely dynamic, rather than based on static rules. It has integration with Oracle Business Rules. It publishes events on the EDN (e.g. onTaskAssigned, onTaskModified, etc.). Nice to see them eating their own dog food with the use of EDN.

They’ve now moved on to Service Data Objects. They’ve introduced entity variables into BPEL to allow working with SDOs.

Additional subjects in this session included Metadata Services (MDS) and the Dev-Test-Prod problem (changing of environment-specific parameters as code is promoted through environments). On the latter, there are a large number of parameters that can now be modified via a “c-plan,” applied at deployment time. Anything that makes this easier is a good thing in my opinion.

Full disclosure: I’m attending Oracle OpenWorld courtesy of Oracle.

The Monday morning keynotes are from Charles Phillips of Oracle, Safra Catz of Oracle, and Ann Livermore of HP.
Catz: Our job is to start sending you software that is engineering to work together.” She also emphasized that “working together” extends to non-Oracle software, too.
Phillips mentioning track record of enhancements to Siebel, JD Edwards, Peoplesoft, etc. and how they will do the same w/Sun, MySQL #oow09
Phillips: MIddleware: 11g of Fusion released, fully-integrated suite including BEA components. All of it is built, upgraded, patched, together.
Catz: First foray into bringing it all together: Sun Oracle Database Machine.
Joel Koppelman from Primavera now on stage talking about PPM. Oracle Primavera controls project execution, Oracle ERP manages all project financial information. Nice emphasis on how it integrates into the “Oracle red stack” and overview of what PPM software can do.
Paco Aubrejuan is now talking about Oracle financials and integration with BI. He used the term “Closed-loop budgeting” to show integration between BI and Financials.
Now, discussing retail is Duncan Angove. He’s also emphasized the integrated suite, feeding BI into the integrated process across the retail applications. He also added that there is a rich, compelling UI supporting it all. The theme this morning seems to be all about integration, using the term “closed loop” frequently.
Next up is SCM/manufacturing, presented by Anthony Lye. He is going to demo new integration between CRM (Siebel CRM) and demand management (Demantra).
Wrapping it up: Oracle have an integrated suite, but you can plug in your own open components as needed. Now switching over to Ann Livermore from HP.
Ann is emphasizing a converged infrastructure, starting with an operating environment for managing shared services that is flexible, yet unified. It adds pools of resources that run on a smart grid in the data center for efficient use of power and computing. Optimizing it all is done through virtualization and automation.
Ann then addressed the importance of application modernization, how it’s a big problem for IT, and how HP is positioned to assist. She’s now discussing the information explosion and the challenges it creates. For HP, “this is a very important business opportunity.” Three components: information infrastructure, information governance, and information services.
Overall, Ann emphasized HP’s role in providing systems, software, and services to support customers problems.

For those of you attending Oracle OpenWorld, please come to my session on Monday the 12th at 4:00pm in the Golden Gate 3 room of the Hilton Hotel. I will be participating in a panel discussion on SOA Governance best practices. Based on the pre-call sessions I had with the other panelists, it should be a very informative session. While you’re at the conference, stop by the conference bookstore and pick up a copy of my book. Thanks to my publisher for making it available.

Disclaimer: I’m attending Oracle OpenWorld courtesy of Oracle.

The keynote began with Scott McNealy reminiscing about Sun technologies, including bringing James Gosling on stage to talk about Java. James joked that he’s never worked for a software company before. To me, this felt more like a eulogy for Sun than a message to rally the troops behind Oracle.

Next came John Fowler to talk about Solaris and Systems. John stated that Sun is now #1 in “all world record key commercial benchmarks”: OLTP, Oracle BI EE, Oracle Hyperion, SAP, PeopleSoft Payroll, Java App Server, Web/Network. He also spent a lot of time talking about the FlashFire server and the new Sun Storage Flash array and the performance and efficiency gains that are coming. This was a much better conversation, probably since they had a product announcement…

Next up, as introduced by Scott, was the “Oracle of Redwood City,” Larry Ellison. He started out with the ad he posted after announcing the acquisition of Oracle in response to how IBM was going after Sun customers. He emphasized how they are going to increase investment into Sun hardware and increase their contributions and investment to MySQL. He then switched into attack mode aiming at IBM and which was faster for OLTP: IBM or Sun. He showed that IBM’s world record TPC-C benchmark with 76 racks of gear against 9 racks of Sun’s latest technology including FlashFire. The results: 25% more throughput for Sun, 16x better response time for Sun. He took a dig at IBM and their power consumption stating that “their microprocessor is known as ‘power’… now we know why.” He then showed a new ad that is going to run that will create a challenge: If they can not run an Oracle database application at least twice as fast on Sun hardware, they will give the challenger ten million dollars. He wrapped it up by inviting IBM to enter. Scott then wrapped the keynote up with some thank you’s and a statement that “the drinks are on Larry.”

In my opinion, this was a rather awkward opening keynote. As I said before, it felt too much like a farewell speech for McNealy, and not a ‘get the crowd excited about the conference’ keynote. I would have rather seen Oracle take the lead and talk positively about Sun, and then give Scott a bit of time to reminisce, rather than the format that was used.

I reviewed an architecture capability model from a colleague recently and one of my responses was that I didn’t like the categorization that was used for the capabilities. While I had no issue with the capabilities themselves, the way that it was organized didn’t make sense to me. I probably spent more time trying to figure out why those categories existed rather than focusing on the capabilities themselves, which were the more important factor.

Enterprise architecture is all about context. EA, by itself, doesn’t deliver technology solutions. A traditional architect delivers a model of a structure, someone else goes off and builds that structure. The architecture provides the context that constrains the decisions made by the builders. Provide poor context, and you increase the chances you’ll wind up with a poor building. My wife has been watching Design Star on HGTV, and it’s very interesting watching the home owners interact with the future designers. A key thing these designers are being judged on is their ability to understand the needs of the home owners. This includes not just what the home owners say (and don’t say), but also the entire space around them. The designer could come up with a great design when evaluated in a vacuum, but if it’s out of context of everything around it and the wants of the home owner, it is a failure.

The same holds true in the world of IT. Provide poor context, and you increase the risk that the developers will build something that just doesn’t work well with everything around it. As Enterprise Architects, it is our job to provide appropriate context for the enterprise concerns. Project sponsors are provide context of their functional needs, it all must be balanced together.

Getting back to my opening statement, as technologists, often times we wind up focusing on providing a context, rather than the right context. It is easy to get caught up in the categories rather than the things being categorized and the purpose for which they are being categorized. I strongly believe that there are always multiple ways of categorizing something, and whether it’s appropriate or not is based on the purpose of the categorization. This is consistent with the multiple viewpoints approach emphasized with TOGAF. Don’t get caught up in coming up with one good categorization for one purpose and then trying to cram that same categorization into everything else you do, because it probably won’t fit. The context must be appropriate, and it’s the job of enterprise architecture to deliver it.

A Gartner press release resulted in some very good posts in the blogosphere related to the future of enterprise architecture. Gartner coined the term ’emergent architecture’ and encouraged companies to adopt it. For the record, I’ve decided that I really don’t like that term, and I don’t think Gartner did a very good job of defining it. They provided a list of seven differentiators from “the traditional approach to EA” but, as Mike Rollings of Burton Group pointed out in his post, most of these things are items that many practicing enterprise architects already did and knew. Do we really need a term for what many of us are already doing?

The post that I really liked came from Dion Hinchliffe at ZDNet. The reason for this is the image that he used in the post, shown here:

While I still don’t like the use of the term emergent architecture and “non-deterministic outcomes”, the picture tries to draw a picture of the forces the come into play in producing solutions.

So what is the role of EA in the future? First, the thing that doesn’t change is the role of EA in providing context. This context is an influencer on the activities that occur in the enterprise. Dion’s drawing attempts to touch on this, but goes at the scope of influence in terms of who can be influenced, rather than the information used to influence. It’s the role of the enterprise architect to bring additional context from outside of the normal scope of the effort to the solution discussion. Influence is not about centralized decision making, so as Mike Rollings called out, most EA’s have never been a centralized decision maker for all things architecture and never will be. We’re simply another party providing influence. Sometimes we have stronger methods, sometimes someone else does. In my book, SOA Governance, I emphasized policy creation first, then policy communication. If the policies are known, any decision maker can apply those policies consistently.

What Dion’s diagram doesn’t capture, is the changing way in which solutions get done. He still has the “projects” box up there. There are many of us that feel this project-based culture is part of the problem. If we take a more product-based or even service-based view of our solutions, those solutions will need to be nurtured and evolve over time, rather than stood up, ignored, and then uprooted with significant effort. This notion, as others have called out, including Neil Macehiter and Neil Ward-Dutton in their book The Technology Garden and practicing enterprise architect James McGovern in his blog, is that of gardening. Do you simply let anything emerge in your garden? No. You plant specific things, remove the weeds, remove weak plants, change some things from year to year, etc. If you don’t plan the garden properly, weeds can choke the life out of other plants, or there can be conflicts within the garden itself, with one type of plant consuming higher amounts of resources, causing others to wither and die.

Coming back to the role of EA as influencer though, the thing we must realize is that the dynamics around us are changing, and as a result, it may change who and how we influence. More and more things are bought rather than built. The level of consumer technology has changed the bar in terms of what individuals can do and expect. If we don’t change our ways along with it, our ability to influence will be diminished. This doesn’t mean things are now emergent. There have always been things that have been emergent, and a healthy company always has some efforts that fall into the category of throw it against the wall and see if it sticks. What’s changed is the pace at which we can do it. We need to incorporate this into the way we execute. I believe the trend toward business architecture is a clear sign of EA trying to do this. We must remember, however, that the artifacts and techniques used to provide context to developers and engineers may not work with the business. We need to speak the business language, not try to get them to understand ours.

In a two-part podcast series, Dave Berry from Oracle’s Fusion Middleware team and Mike van Alst, a consultant with IT-eye, discussed some remarks I made in an earlier OTN Arch2Arch podcast regarding SOA and reuse. Specifically, I tried to de-emphasize the reuse aspect of SOA. Many reuse programs that I’ve seen or read about have two key elements:

1. Building things in a reusable manner
2. Making those things visible

While noble goals, these approaches are at significant risk of producing the intended results. The first item has a fundamental problem in that it is all but impossible to define exact what “building in a reusable manner” is. We can use open, interoperable standards rather than closed, proprietary ones, but is this the key barrier to reuse? There’s probably some low hanging fruit that this will capture, but there’s so much more to reuse than this. From a technical standpoint, one must also consider the structures of the information being exchanged and the varying granularity of the information being exchanged, among other things.

On the second item, visibility is important, there’s no doubt about it. But visibility without context will not be successful. It’s a matter of providing the right information at the right time. Too many initiatives that are associated with the collection of IT artifacts, be it reuse, SOA, portfolio management, ITSM, or any of the like, fail because the information is never put into the context of the processes that need that information. How many times have you seen the information collected as part of a fire drill for an immediate need, only to grow stale once that fire drill is completed.

The two things I recommend are service ownership and linkage to key IT processes. If you’ve heard me talk on panel discussions at conferences, you’ll know that my answer to the question, “What’s the one piece of advice you have for companies adopting SOA?” has always been, “Define your service owners.” Someone is given the responsibility for a functional area, providing capabilities to the rest of the organization and accountable for driving out the redundancies that may exist. This is a tricky exercise, because service ownership has a cost associated with it. Expending that cost for a service that is only used by one consumer can lead to waste, so it’s not a silver bullet. It does, however, being the cultural change from a project-driven organization to more of a product-driven/service-driven organization. Without having someone accountable for the elimination of redundancy in a domain and serving the needs of consumers, it won’t happen.

The second piece of advice is the process integration. To avoid creating repositories that see infrequent use after initial population, you have to define the role of that information in the IT processes. If you have a service repository, when do you expect project architects and designers to look into that repository for services that may be appropriate. How about it the strategic planning process? The scoping effort for a project likely begins long before a project architect is assigned? How is the service repository used in those activities? By defining the links with key IT processes and ensuring that those processes are changed to use the repositories involved, with appropriate governance to make sure those changes are occurring, you will make sure that your services are visible, and more importantly, that the right people are looking for them at the right time.

This is another blog on the subject of a service-based view of Enterprise Architecture. Previous posts focused on the actual service definitions (here and here) and a general view on communications, this one focuses on the actual management of those services, specifically on the notion of reporting.

In my experience, as teams try to transition to a service-based view, a key challenge is in moving from an inwardly-focused view to an outwardly-focused view. In other words, shifting to a focus on the customer. An easy way to encourage this shift is to think about your communication to the customer. If you think of examples of great service, it goes beyond the communication associated with service execution. As a simple example, think about your credit card. There are credit cards that simply allow you to make your purchases and then send you a bill. Some cards, however, send you a report every year that gives you information on how you’ve used your credit allowing you to make better financial plans. So, how can we take this same approach to the EA (or any other) service offerings?

The simple part of this is to make a commitment to communication with your customers. At a minimum, think about reporting to your direct customers and their management. In all likelihood, you’ll need to add two additional audiences to this. First, is senior management over EA. Depending on where EA sits in the organization, this could be senior IT leadership or it could be senior enterprise leadership. Second, is the group most people are used to dealing with, and that’s internal management of EA. The more complicated part of this is figuring out what to report and how frequently to report it. I hope to cover this in more detail in a future post, but for now, think about how you can add additional value to the relationship. Rather than simply reporting status of engagements, provide additional value through an analysis of activities, added information from EA research services, or some transparency into the activities occurring within Enterprise Architecture.