• SOA Consortium Meeting Agenda Brussels - June 27 and June 28
  The SOA-C agenda for Brussels. Good speakers, topics and participants. If you are in Europe, consider attending. The meeting is open to the public. Contact me for additional info - brenda at soa-consortium dot org.
  (tags: soa-c brussels june2007)
• BEA enters "Event Space" with Event-Driven SOA...
  "An optimized business requires both service and event processing. When these processing types are combined, the result is extreme agility – enabling the enterprise to conduct business at light speed."
  (tags: bea eda soa event_processing)

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• StrikeIron Blog
  Bob Brauer on IBM's Mashup Ecosystem Summit event in San Francisco. I talk about this as a SOA adoption/advancement challenge as well. "Availability of services, the industry needs more -- services represent the building blocks."
  (tags: strikeiron services soa mashups)

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• RESTful Web Services « Jon Udell
  Jon Udell's review of RESTFul Web Services by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby. Interesting excerpt on REST and transactions. Authors do not see "smooth glide" between ROA (REST oriented architecture) and SOA.
  (tags: roa soa rest)
• RESTful Web Services, By Leonard Richardson, Sam Ruby
  RESTFul Web Services Table of Contents
  (tags: soa roa rest)

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• SOS
  "SOA as a business facilitator, supporting and easing mergers, acquisitions and outsourcing programmes...in the telecoms and airline sectors...aligning a SOA to facilitate and support an organization’s DNA, may be the greatest challenge."
  (tags: soa practitioners human_element)

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• Report: Tech's Gender Gap Widened by Uninviting Workplace
  Article is more balanced than the title. I'd like to see the WITI report. I know successful, influential, get the best projects, women in Tech. As well, I've seen/experienced the "no one hears the idea until a man restates it".
  (tags: women_in_tech)

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Having left my corporate budget responsibilities behind, I hadn't really thought of this.  Today's WSJ has an article on SaaS adoption.  One of the driving factors in large organizations is accounting.  Not, providing accounting services, but how software expense is accounted for:

"Early on, that attracted mostly small businesses that weren't previously using any software at all and could easily justify trying this new approach. But larger companies stayed away, having invested in the late 1990s in traditional software from the likes of Oracle and SAP AG.

Now that's changing, partly because of an accounting quirk. Companies are starting to get rid of their old software at a time when capital-expenditure budgets are tight. Traditional software and the hardware to run it are considered a capital expenditure. But Web-based services are typically sold as a subscription, which means corporate buyers can account for them as a maintenance expense, which falls into a different bucket.

As a result, companies are turning to start-ups such as Ketera, LucidEra Inc. and Workday Inc. that are offering Web-based services for tasks like controlling spending and managing employees. Meanwhile, a handful of older software-as-a-service companies such as Taleo Corp. and RightNow Technologies Inc. have gone public; another, NetSuite Inc., is widely expected to try to do so.

Big software makers like SAP and Oracle are themselves ramping up efforts in the area. Google Inc. is even getting involved, with Web-based word-processing and spreadsheet services for businesses. Research firm Gartner Inc. calculates the world-wide market for software as a service will grow to $19.3 billion by 2011 from $6.3 billion last year."

I don't know about everyone else, but I always found getting capital to be a battle.  But maintenance, well you have to keep the ship afloat.  Interesting to consider if you find yourself in the bootstrapping phase of architecture and/or technology adoption.

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• You're a Nobody Unless Your Name Googles Well - WSJ.com
  huh, google-proof babies..."So when Ms. Wilson, now 32, was pregnant with her first child, she ran every baby name she and her husband, Justin, considered through Google to make sure her baby wouldn't be born unsearchable."
  (tags: google society)

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Wall Street & Technology has a good article on SOA for Business Transformation in banking.  The article speaks to SOA implementations at Wachovia and Bank of America, and is supplemented by commentary from Microsoft, Tower Group and Butler Group. 

Below are some excerpts of interest that align with findings from the SOA Consortium's Executive Summits and (of course) my own soapbox.  I skipped the detailed technology sections, because that's the easy part. (The headings and emphasis are mine)

Business-Driven SOA

"Charged with differentiating the bank and growing its business in the face of larger-scale competitors, Wachovia's CIB division had to map out where its technology needed to be to match where it wanted the business to go, relates Bishop."

"As Wachovia and other banks are discovering, leveraging SOA's loosely coupled services to overcome siloed technology has the potential to completely change a financial institution."

"Approaching SOA with clear business goals and realistic expectations may be the most important step a bank can take, Wachovia's Bishop says. Although Certoma set the ultimate goal for the bank's SOA transformation as business differentiation, she also outlined more-specific subsets of the project, including decreased time to market and cost of delivery for new products, Bishop points out."

SOA is Not a Slam Dunk

"Yet the road to a full SOA implementation is marred with potholes and roadblocks, and according to experts, it's important for financial institutions to be aware of the key decisions they face about services, technology and governance."

SOA Infrastructure Should be Flexible

""Wachovia required that all its technology be componentized and capable of being extracted, the bank's Bishop says. Wachovia didn't want any technology built to a specific language or a specific format. "This is where a lot of SOA strategies fall short," Bishop asserts. "A lot of people in the past would build business logic and need to inherit that it was running on a Java container. We didn't want that. We wanted to reuse so that it could be moved about in different ways." According to Bishop, he bought a lot of best-of-breed technologies that are open standards-based and pluggable."

Governance and Portfolio Management -- People, Process, Tools

"To manage business components and services along with infrastructure services and components, Wachovia's Bishop relates, the bank's CIB division created a portfolio management function, in terms of personnel and tools, to govern the project and track the usage of those elements. The first step was to create an open source community, which set specific rules in terms of what the CIB's business units could contribute or use, according to Bishop. The second step was to establish peer groups across the various applications to understand who built what, how it was being used, who reused what and how it was reused, he adds. The third part of the governance plan included mandates that each development team contribute and/or reuse various components of the SOA as part of their annual objectives. And finally, Bishop notes, the CIB division created a steering committee that prioritized projects.

Bank of America delegated governance for SOA to the four CIOs within the organization, the bank's Conroy says... While Conroy says he has a pretty tight grip on technology and product governance, he's still trying to "work out the kinks" when it comes to governance over services. Service-level agreements across CIO units are the next hurdle, Conroy says, especially figuring out how to price services and allocate costs. "The two things that make SOA hard to do in a big group are governance -- who can generate the requirements and decide what your billing is -- and who pays for it," he contends."

Business and IT Collaboration Required

"An SOA implementation will bring about many changes in the financial institution, including new partnerships between business and IT, according to TowerGroup, which asserts that such partnerships are integral to overcoming the challenge of breaking down the walls between businesses in the bank."

"Bishop offers advice for banks just starting on their SOA journey. "You've got to focus," he says. "You've got to be committed. You need to do it in incremental building blocks. SOA needs to be business-aligned and needs to have a top-down map and a bottom-up approach." And bank executives need to know what they're getting into: "It's a full-time part-time job for even the highest-ranking executives," Bishop says."

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• Macehiter Ward-Dutton: Blog on IT-business alignment and related things
  MWD is looking for beta testers..."The heart of the tool is a self-assessment model that looks at six dimensions of competence/readiness: concepts, strategy, architecture, organisation & people, governance, and technology infrastructure."
  (tags: soa planning)

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