SOA in Action Blog

There's been a lot of speculation that SOA may be wholly absorbed into EA in the near future, but perhaps it may happen the other way around. Maybe EA will grow out of SOA. This was reflected in an observation from Stephen Bennett at The Open Group's SOA track, who observed that often, SOA may serve as a catalyst for engaging better EA practices. "I've seen some customers back into EA after starting an SOA project," he said.

I also participated in a rousing panel discussion led by Dana Gardner and featuring Tony Baer, Eric Knorr, Andras Szakal, and David Cotteril.

One thing that was interesting to observe as part of the panel discussion -- as well as the conference in general -- are the similar challenges being seen by both commercial businesses and government agencies in moving to SOA. And one of the key challenges is identifying who, exactly, should be piecing together these things called SOAs.

There is clearly more convergence in the roles of enterprise architects, developers, and executives -- since SOA draws upon requirements for each. Do organizations need some sort of superhero type that can understand and bridge all these areas? Not necessarily, but stay tuned for the podcast for details on what skills are in demand.

Patty Donovan of the Open Group did a great job of summarizing a lot of session content from the event. I've pulled from some of her observations of the event (with some of my own sprinkled in):.

Wing Commander Shaun Harvey, Department Director, United Kingdom SAF/XCPA: "Much like complex, highly distributed businesses, the Department of Defense (DoD) is comprised of many interdependent components. These include the Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marines, each of which shares common integration and interoperation issues. While the DoD and the Air Force use Architecture Federation to help address integration, the Wing Commander explained the Air Force’s development of an Architecture Federation approach called 'Fit For Federation' to specifically support interoperation.

Marc Othersen, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research: "Business imperatives, increased regulatory pressure, and customer demands are forcing many CIOs to adopt a structured, enterprise wide approach to deal with IT governance, risk, and compliance (GRC). Because IT GRC initiatives have traditionally been scattered across organizations without much coordination, many companies are looking for solutions that can help them create a unified approach to managing information risk and IT compliance requirements while ensuring good governance at the same time. Marc outlined Forrester’s view on IT GRC and gave recommendations for developing a robust IT GRC program."

Ron Schuldt, Senior Staff Systems Architect, Lockheed Martin Enterprise Business Services: "TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework) does a great job of identifying the processes necessary for defining an enterprise architecture, but it does not assure “Boundaryless Information Flow” across organizations. The Open Group standard that provides the foundation framework for a controlled vocabulary, known as the Universal Data Element Framework (UDEF) is part of the solution, argued Schuldt. His presentation provided a detailed demonstration on UDEF and highlighted the role of this critical standard within the enterprise."

David Cotterill, Head of Innovation, UK Government Department for Work and Pensions: "Historically government services have been built around products not the customers using the services, Cotterill explained. Today’s reality is that customers are now at the heart of these services. His presentation focused on the work that the UK Government Department for Work and Pensions (the equivalent of the Social Security Administration in the U.S.) is doing in the area of Enterprise Architecture, and its use of TOGAF to put customers at the center of government services. Through this architectural journey, his organization is now able to provide services to its customers that are more effective, efficient and agile."

George S. Paras, Managing Director, EAdirections: "While we have seen significant advancement in enterprise architecture, all architects really need to view themselves as both business and IT professionals to ensure the proper degree of alignment between the two sides. Furthermore, architects need to prepare a credible Business/IT Alignment Roadmap with their business constituents to achieve true business transformation. This strategy must encompass several components and stages, including service oriented analysis, service design, and service management – all from an enterprise-wide perspective. Finally, a company needs to assess its fundamental capability requirements before starting an EA journey in order to be successful, according to Paras."

Peter Van Hoof, Principal Enterprise Architect, Sasol, South Africa: "Sasol, South Africa’s largest industrial company, has a strongly entrenched federated business model and utilizes a deeply embedded business project methodology across its many diverse business units, called the Business Development and Implementation Model (BD&IM). Van Hoof’s presentation covered how Sasol aligned TOGAF with the BD&IM – a great example of how to standardize architecture delivery in a federated architecture environment using TOGAF."

Robert Weisman, Partner & Executive Consultant, Global Enterprise Architecture Practice Leader, CGI: "Weisman highlighted several applications of TOGAF in selected US State and Canadian Federal Government engagements. The presentation provided recommendations for future use of TOGAF within a government environment and also discussed how TOGAF works in conjunction with other EA frameworks, including Zachman, EA Tool, Australian Government Outcome Based Planning and Australian Government Architecture."

Matt Vandenbush, Enterprise Architect, Brady Corporation: "'Almost half of EA groups are dissolved within two years and many more do not meet stakeholder expectations,'" Vandebush said. "This is more often the outcome of poor internal advocacy- architects within their organizations need to prove the value of EA as a tool for making better decisions; and TOGAF has served as Brady Corporation’s guide to achieve this level of success. Vandenbush made recommendations on the three most important activities to make EA matter within any organization: getting your governance processes under control; prepare to use the TOGAF architecture development method (ADM); and focus on 'delivery.'"

Pinaki Ghosh, lead architect specialist with The Dow Chemical Company: "The main competitive advantage in information architecture comes down to a well constructed information footprint model within an EA framework, such as TOGAF, Zachman or DoDAF. During the transition from legacy architecture to SOA, however, one of the critical things most companies neglect is the preparation of an Enterprise Object Library. Such a library contains both business and IT objects categorized by international standards, unique artifact numbers and database identities. Pinaki’s presentation delved into The Dow Chemical Company’s use of a business object library to better align IT services with the business."

Michael Rollings, senior analyst with Burton Group: "Although a SaaS solution may solve immediate issues, organizations blinded by its promise often ignore architectural challenges, integration issues, and other risks. After framing the business context for SaaS, Michael discussed several architectural principles which should be considered."

Tony Carrato, Worldwide Chief Operations Architect, for IBM's SOA IBM Advanced Technology Team: There are a number of ways value can and should be tracked. Some of these metrics may include number of services developed in some period of time, number of services reused, and percent of reuse, "something or other about business flexibility," and decreased costs – usually in IT. (Carrato was fairly adamant, however, in noting that simply basing an SOA's value on the total number of services in production was not a good measurement.)

The important thing is that these results are measured -- which is sometimes hard to do, since SOA often delivers "soft" benefits -- such as business flexibility. However, many organizations do not track the metrics to determine if SOA's benefits were realized. Carrato pointed to recent research that found that most organizations are "rigorous to very rigorous" when justifying a project, however, "comparatively few look back at the project, to determine if the stated value was received."

There are three categories of measurement, he explained: executive measurements (business results, pulse metrics, leading indicators); EA measurements (business & IT value, progress toward business & IT goals, compliance); and initiative and solution measurements for SOA specifically (quality, cycle time, cost, use satisfaction, business case realization). Things that should be measured include cost savings across a portfolio of projects -- not a single project. In addition, organizations need to get into the habit of measuring the outcomes of projects -- and not just forecast the value of SOA before the project has started and leave it at that.

Dan Blum, Senior VP, Principal Analyst, Security and Risk Management Strategies, Burton Group: "As organizations become more virtual and mobile in nature, cyber attacks are more targeted and the effectiveness of traditional network controls has declined, Blum argued. As a result, he believes that organizations need to start distributing control to network access points, security gateways, data centers, servers, and client endpoints. Because so-called security zones will become less physical and more logical, they will need to be maintained through security overlays on the network formed by secure endpoints and protocols - all controlled through a dynamic policy infrastructure. Blum concluded that organizations will also need to establish more direct control over the information itself, building finer-grained controls into user identity management, databases, and applications."

Adrian Seccombe, CISO and Senior Enterprise Information Architect, Eli Lilly & Company Ltd.: "After opening with an overview of the security threat landscape, Mr. Seccombe provided background on one of The Open Group’s managed consortia, The Jericho Forum. In the four years since it was founded, the Jericho Forum has promoted the need for a new approach to information security, called de-perimeterization. As one of the Jericho Forum's founding members and staunchest supporters, Mr. Seccombe, explained how the principles based on this approach are being put into practice inside Eli Lilly."

Dr. Alenka Brown, US Department of Defense Chief Information Office: "Dr. Brown posited that the growing shift towards SOA is an inevitable step that will bring about a major challenge related to the "human interoperability" and security issues between humans and "computing" communications and cyber-infrastructure systems. Brown then shared details on the DoD’s Human Interoperability Policy Framework, created to transform information sharing across net-centric environments."

The OpenGroup conference focused on enterprise architecture issues in the government realm, but the message from many speakers was that SOA proponents within public sector bodies still had to make ROI cases for their projects, and be able to "sell" the initiatives to the "business" itself.

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