Lately, I've had a lot of conversations on talking about SOA with the business.  Particularly on the best ways to build understanding and gain buy-in.  No surprise, success is greater when IT adopts a business dialect and mindset.  So, I'm curious, when you talk about S-O-A with the business, do you talk in IT terms, or business terms?

S-O-A in IT Terms is:

• Service-Oriented Architecture

• Sharing Our Assets

• Strategy Offering Agility

• Stream of Acronyms

S-O-A in Business Terms enables:

• Strategic Outcome Attainment

• Seizing Operational Agility

• Silo-ed Organization Abolishment

• Situational Optimization Alternatives

• Shedding Obsolete Approaches

• Speed Offering Advantage

Do you lead with an explanation of service-oriented architecture?  Or do you close with a "by the way, service-oriented architecture enables this"?  Are you successful in your messaging?  Why, or why not?

Posted by brendamichelson in SOA • business driven architecture | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• InfoQ: SOA Programming Models
  Boris Lublinsky on WCF (Indigo), JBI (Java Business Integration) and SCA (Service Component Architecture)
  (tags: sca jbi soa wcf)
• The SOA Magazine
  "This case study describes the application and explains how SOA helped to meet the business needs and challenges and of the credit card issuing division of a major financial institution. "
  (tags: soa casestudy)
• IBM developerWorks : Blogs : Software architecture, software engineering, and Renaissance Jazz
  Grady Booch: "multitude of hard technical and process decisions that must be made, ... what distinguishes a good service from a bad one? what should the granularity of a service be?..."
  (tags: soa booch)

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• Governance 2.0
  Scott from CSS: "that mashups are often on the experimental end of the spectrum and that part of improved governance is going to have to be around learning to harvest enterprise-quality assets from the mashup incubators. Embrace the enterprise incubators
  (tags: soa governance)
• Adam Michelson (no relation) - An SOA call to arms
  Adam urges the SOA Community to make SOA relevant and accessible. He asks consultants to "Make SOA relevant to the business." I'd add architects...Architects need to engage with their business ahead of consultants and vendors
  (tags: adam_michelson soa relevance)

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• Skills Gap Hurts Technology Boom in India - New York Times
  "In a country once regarded as a bottomless well of low-cost, ready-to-work, English-speaking engineers, a shortage looms."..."The skills gap reflects the narrow availability of high-quality college education in India and the galloping pace of the country
  (tags: global outsourcing)
• Search Power Takes a Stand for Sun Power - New York Times
  No industry is safe..."Google might even be able to generate surplus solar electricity that it could sell back to PG&E, creating another stream of revenue, said Mr. Parker of Cleantech Network."
  (tags: google green)

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• Kathy Sierra: Knocking the exuberance out of employees
  "If you knock out exuberance, you knock out curiosity, and curiosity is the single most important attribute in a world that requires continuous learning and unlearning just to keep up...we've also killed their desire to learn, grow, adapt, innovate, and c
  (tags: leadership architects)

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• Wired: Rebuilding Microsoft
  The Wired Rebuilding Microsoft Article I posted on (Business-Driven Architect 9/28) is now publicly available
  (tags: microsoft ozzie leadership)

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Today is the third day of the Office 2.0 Podcast Jam.  So far, 8 podcasts are available.  All touch on different aspects of, as Cote says, "*2.0" (Office, Enterprise, Web).  Richard MacManus provided a great keynote on Office 2.0 as a paradigm shift.  He spoke of the importance of "Web native functionality" in "office" applications.  Anne Zelenka, the jam founder, conducted a jolting interview on what it really means to be a paperless office in Afghanistan.  Laura Blankenship described the barriers to *2.0 adoption in higher education.  Scott and Cote seemed to have a great time talking about Identity, Learning and Shame.  Ken Camp talked about the importance of presence, relevance and availability in respect to VOIP platforms.  Greg Olsen spoke of businesses "going bedouin".  Eric Severson spoke on the rules of Office 2.0, which I then proceeded to break in my mixing "*2.0" and SOA for a business-focused Enterprise Toolkit.

I've enjoyed all the podcasts, and have made notes to check into the following: dabbledb, coghead, zimbra, and embedded presence.  I'm sure that list will grow as the week goes on.  The great thing about these podcasts is they are informative, yet short.  The longest one is 15 minutes.  The average seems to be 7 minutes.  So, if you have a break between meetings and/or phone calls, jump on over.  I know I'll be back, I want to hear what Sandy has to say on "Web 2.0 and BPM", as well as the latest from the Office 2.0 conference (travel required to that one!).

For those interested in the technology behind the jam, see this post of Anne's.  For my own podcasting, I used Audacity and followed these instructions.  It was pretty simple, even for a podcast newbie. 

Tags: office20jam

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• Office 2.0 Podcast Jam Officially Starts Tomorrow (Monday 10/9) - Chat Open Now
  The Office 2.0 Podcast Jam starts on Monday. Listen now to Anne Zelenka's (Anne 2.0) welcome podcast. I've got a contribution, my first (and perhaps only) podcast, going live later in the week.
  (tags: office20jam)

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Lately, every time I start a post on an interesting SOA paper, Joe gets there first!  Not so this time...

During BEAWorld San Francisco, BEA released a practitioner written and reviewed SOA Practitioner's Guide:

"To help develop a shared language and collective body of knowledge about SOA, a group of SOA practitioners created this SOA Practitioners’ Guide series of documents. In it, these SOA experts describe and document best practices and key learnings relating to SOA, to help other companies address the challenges of SOA. The SOA Practitioners’ Guide is envisioned as a multi-part collection of publications that can act as a standard reference encyclopedia for all SOA stakeholders."

The guide has three chapters, each a standalone document: Why SOA?, SOA Reference Architecture, and Introduction to Services Lifecycle. 

When I reviewed the guide, pre-publication, I commented back to the authors that I found the Services Lifecycle chapter most interesting, because it focuses on "How" (not "What"), and its obvious the advice came from practitioners, in large environments, with active enterprise architecture practices and a slew of technology and applications.

"Chapter 3: Introduction to Services Lifecycle.  It provides a detailed process for services management though the service lifecycle, from inception through to retirement or repurposing of the services. It also contains an appendix that includes organization and governance best practices, templates, comments on key SOA standards, and recommended links for more information."

While you might not agree with all of the answers presented in the SOA Practitioner Guide, the guide is of tremendous value in that it raises many relevant questions.  I know from my own experience in leading IT transformation, one of the hardest things to do, is figure out all the things you have to do.  And for that reason alone, I recommend taking a look at this guide. 

Two comments on the content itself.  First, the SOA Reference Architecture is extremely BEA (JEE, Portal, ESB) heavy.  But, as Yogish Pai pointed out in a conversation, and in the guide, the Reference Architecture is presented as "an" SOA reference architecture, not "the" SOA reference architecture.

Second, in the "requirements and analysis" phase of the service lifecycle, the guide (correctly) identifies business centric activities, such as business modeling and capturing business motivation, but then lists architects as 'optional' participants in this phase.  I disagree.  I think architects should take every possible opportunity to interact with "business" folks and a business modeling session is a great place to start. 

The more architects can learn about, think about, and converse about their business, the greater the likelihood architecture will be seen (funded) as a business enabler (think innovation), rather than an IT enabler (think TCO containment).  Perhaps this falls into the role of the business architect?

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