• CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership - How To Navigate A Sea of SOA Standards
  Heffner says focus on: SOAP 1.1, WSDL 1.1, WS-I Basic Profile 1.0 or 1.1, UDDI 3.0.2, WS-Security 1.0 or 1.1, WS-BPEL 2.0, BPMN, WSRP 1.0, XML Schema 1.0, XSLT 1.0, XPath 1.0, XQuery 1.0, XML Signature and XML Encryption.
  (tags: soa webservices standards)
• Sold on eBay, Shipped by Amazon.com - New York Times
  Another example of Amazon's flexible business model due to service-oriented underpinnings...
  (tags: amazon business_networks)

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• IBM, MySQL team up on database software | Reuters
  "Executives at IBM, the world's No. 2 software maker, and MySQL told Reuters they will announce a technology and marketing partnership on Wednesday at a MySQL users' conference in Santa Clara, California."
  (tags: ibm mysql opensource)

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Amr Elssamadisy has started a new series/discussion at InfoQ on SOA and Agile.  The initial article asks "SOA and Agile: Friends of Foes".  This is similar to a conversation we had here last summer.  Including the high quality comments.  Below are some excerpts.   I disagree with the last two clash bullets, especially the third.

Article Open:

"SOA aims at making the entire enterprise agile by using services as the building blocks for applications. Agile software development aims at making organizations agile by introducing practices that increase communication and feedback. Which is right? Which is better? Are we comparing apples and oranges? Can they be used together, and if so, how?"

On the Friends side:

"SOA and Agile share the same broad goals. They both recognize that change is an inevitability and that organizations need to effectively cope with that change. So we would expect that Agile is by default the methodology of choice when building SOAs and vice versa - right?"

On the Foes side:

"One of the main reasons is that they come at the problem from different roots and initially different directions. Agile is historically grass-roots and small-project based, although throughout the past years the community has gained experience and learned to adapt the principles of the Agile Manifesto to large projects. SOA is a newer initiative and is top-down in nature and takes a divide and conquer approach to software development. This approach, especially the 'divide' part, typically results in low-bandwidth communication between teams such as documents, specifications, etc... .

Specifically, here are three areas where SOA and Agile clash:

• SOA encourages that architecture be upfront while Agile has a derogative term for this approach coined BDUF.
• SOA encourages teams split along functional lines while Agile encourages cross-functional teams.
• SOA does not have a position with respect to feedback and change of the services once they are built while Agile is focused on frequent and feedback at both a technical and personal level."

I encourage you to read the article and the comments. 

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This week, I've been working on a whitepaper write-up of the Insights from the SOA Consortium's Executive Summits.  This paper goes deeper than the Top 5 Insights we shared in the webinar. 

Last night, I wrote this:

"To collaborate effectively, business and IT professionals must speak a common language.  Historically, business professionals have been encouraged to increase their IT literacy.  This has proven successful at the project execution level.  However, collaboration on strategy and architecture is a business conversation first. 

“Our entry is always the process and that’s what we actually talk about – how to optimize the process, how to drive the process…When I hear business people talk about systems and they mention System A, System B, System C, I know we’re in trouble.  Because basically that means to me is that we are locked into the constraints of the environment.” – CTO during SOA Executive Summit

The CIO and CTO participants encourage business-smarts in their IT organizations.  IT professionals, particularly senior leaders and enterprise architects, must understand the business, and be able to relate IT capability to business value generation."

This morning, I saw Jon Udell's post on "Talking to Everyone", in it he asks:

How do you talk to everyone about the transformative benefits of the technologies we’re so excited about, in ways that don’t make people flip the bozo switch and tune you out? How do you tell stories that make the benefits of the technology come alive for people, in ways they can understand, without overwhelming them with technical detail, but at the same time without dumbing down your explanation of the technology?

So, I'm curious.  What techniques, metaphors, or stories do you use to "talk to everyone" about SOA?  Enterprise Architecture?

[Disclosure: The SOA Consortium is a client of Elemental Links]

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• Update: BlackBerry suffers widespread outage | InfoWorld | News | 2007-04-18 | By John Blau, IDG News Service
  "Companies ..connect their mail servers to a BlackBerry Enterprise Solution (BES) server located on their premises, which in turn is linked to one of RIM's NOCs, according to Mohr-McClune. "All data slides to Canada and back," she said."
  (tags: blackberry_blues)
• Computer Science Takes Steps to Bring Women to the Fold - New York Times
  "The Advanced Placement high school course in computer science may be part of the problem...“It teaches Java programming, which is very appealing to a lot of people, but not to others. It doesn’t teach what you can do with computers.”"
  (tags: computer_science women_in_tech)
• Pet Food Recall Expanded on New Finding: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance
  Suddenly, the "Raw Food diet" seems like a good idea.."An industrial chemical that led to a nationwide recall of more than 100 brands of cat and dog foods has been found to contaminate a second pet food ingredient, expanding the recall further."
  (tags: petfood dogs)
• TurboTax Users Who Faced Delays Get Filing Reprieve From IRS - WSJ.com
  Overtaxed infrastructure? "During times of peak demand, Intuit was processing 50 to 60 returns per second, he said. IRS spokesman Bruce Friedland said filers who encountered delays with Intuit's servers will not be penalized if their returns rolled in lat
  (tags: irs web capacity_planning)

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• Report: CIOs, Stop Squandering Your Time
  Writeup on Gartner report - A couple of points seem contradictory: ease standardization, yet rein in application and infrastructure proliferation. And yes, talk and measure in business terms, but don't lose sight of IT measurements
  (tags: gartner cio)

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• Google Acquires Internet (May 2017)
  "MAY 12, 2017 - BUSINESSWIRE. Mountain View-based search giant Google Inc today announced they’ve acquired the internet for the astounding sum of $2,455.5 billion in cash."
  (tags: humor google)
• OASIS - News - 2007-04-12 - BPEL 2.0 approved as standard
  "OASIS...today announced that its members have approved the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) version 2.0 as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification."
  (tags: bpel2.0 soa)
• Web Services Business Process Execution Language
  Final BPEL 2.0 Spec
  (tags: bpel2.0)
• WhatsNew20Spec - WSBPEL Wiki
  List of what's new is the BPEL 2.0 Spec. I'm looking forward to the publication (by OASIS) of the BPEL 2.0 primer. Guess I need to refresh my BPEL Primer for "2.0"
  (tags: bpel2.0 oasis)

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• Deb’s Blog » Blog Archive » IONA Acquires LogicBlaze
  details on the IONA-LogicBlaze deal
  (tags: iona logicblaze soa opensource)

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• SOA Consortium Holds Successful Inaugural Meeting, Executive Summit ''Top 5 Lessons Learned'' Report Webcast and Announces Nine New Members
  The reason for my blogging lull... Working with the SOA Consortium on the Summits, Readouts, and Inaugural meeting. Lots of good content and discussion from the SOA-C activities, hope to bring that to the public soon.
  (tags: soa-c clients)

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• InfoWorld: Product Guide: Coral8 Engine : Review
  Despite some shortcomings in this still-maturing product’s feature set, the easy-to-use tools and comfortable programming language will get your development teams moving. The final outcome is a solid engine with the potential to affordably address the a
  (tags: coral8 infoworld testcenter cep)
• Gartner Event Processing Summit
  New Gartner Conference on Event Processing, co-located with Business Process Management. "This new conference brings together the thought leaders on event driven, real time enterprise solutions and business activity monitoring."
  (tags: gartner esp cep eda)

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• Mark's Blog: Flat IT
  "the concept of Flat IT is that the traditional IT “Stack” (HW, Drivers, OS, Database, Applications, etc) essentially disappears. Capabilities (Business Services) are simply stitched together from a collection of smaller “services” that provide sp
  (tags: flat_IT soa emc)

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