No one does "big bangs" better than the US Department of Defense (DoD). However, when it comes to service oriented architecture, DoD prefers not to make a "big bang," but take things one quiet, deliberate step at a time.
Dave Chesebrough, president of the Association for Enterprise Information (AFEI), hosted a roundtable discussion at the recent SOA in Action conference, in which he spoke to Dan Risacher, staff member with the CIO's office at the Department of Defense, Matthew Swartz, branch head of Enterprise Initiatives for the US Navy, and Mike Darretta, JBoss solutions architect for Red Hat, about the emerging role of service oriented architecture within the world's largest and most complex organization.
Dan Risacher kicked off the session explaining just how serious SOA is as an initiative at the DoD. "SOA is a concept that sometimes has been unfairly used and confused with specific things like Web services, and a specific suite of technologies and products," he explained. "We see SOA as being a high level architecture and approach for how you think about things, that brings with it a certain set of characteristics that can really help you build an agile service-oriented information enterprise."
For the defense department, SOA has been an incremental journey, versus a huge sweep of its technology landscape, Risacher continued. "We're focusing on things that are scalable, cost effective. How do I do things in a spiral kind of capability... where I'm fielding new capabilities as I go along -- rather than trying to take a big-bang waterfall type of approach, trying to figure it out all up front in the requirements phase."
Risacher said DoD formulated and published its SOA strategy in May 2007. The goals of the effort are to "get people to provide services on the network, make sure that those services are visible, accessible and understandable to other users, incentivize people to use them, improvise and use them, and figure out how to manage them from a network operations standpoint as well as a governance standpoint."
In doing so, DoD hopes to speed up the application development and deployment process, and better target functionality where it is needed. "We have a concept we call 'communities of interest,' in which we get groups of related users together who need those capabilities to actually help define what do the services need to be. We don't want to have to wait and figure out in great detail what those services are before we start providing them. But having that dialog enables us to provide services that are actually responsive to what people need."
There is enormous cost-savings potential as well, especially from an integration standpoint, he added. "For large DoD systems, we often find that each connection costs $1 million a year to maintain -- that's not an exaggeration. When I have to go out pay one big defense integrator and some other second defense integrator to make their systems talk to each other -- and inevitably something changes either in the interconnect or the data standards change -- it ends up being very expensive to have a whole lot of those links. So I'm trying to get that down to where we have a much smaller set of interfaces, rather than a very large set of interconnections."
The name of the game is faster time to delivery, Risacher continued. "We're trying to influence acquisition strategy needs to focus on smaller and shorter deliverables, so we can task as we learn, reduce risks, and get those capabilities out faster. We're focusing on standards and open architecture, and how to share some IT resources. It's a big, difficult shift for an organization as large as defense department."
And the work continues. Next up on the DoD's IT agenda: complex event processing and business activity monitoring, Risacher said.
In the next post, we cover the US Navy's SOA-based enterprise portal approach, discussed by Matt Swartz.
Dave Chesebrough, president of the Association for Enterprise Information (AFEI), hosted a roundtable discussion at the recent SOA in Action conference, in which he spoke to Dan Risacher, staff member with the CIO's office at the Department of Defense, Matthew Swartz, branch head of Enterprise Initiatives for the US Navy, and Mike Darretta, JBoss solutions architect for Red Hat, about the emerging role of service oriented architecture within the world's largest and most complex organization.
Dan Risacher kicked off the session explaining just how serious SOA is as an initiative at the DoD. "SOA is a concept that sometimes has been unfairly used and confused with specific things like Web services, and a specific suite of technologies and products," he explained. "We see SOA as being a high level architecture and approach for how you think about things, that brings with it a certain set of characteristics that can really help you build an agile service-oriented information enterprise."
For the defense department, SOA has been an incremental journey, versus a huge sweep of its technology landscape, Risacher continued. "We're focusing on things that are scalable, cost effective. How do I do things in a spiral kind of capability... where I'm fielding new capabilities as I go along -- rather than trying to take a big-bang waterfall type of approach, trying to figure it out all up front in the requirements phase."
Risacher said DoD formulated and published its SOA strategy in May 2007. The goals of the effort are to "get people to provide services on the network, make sure that those services are visible, accessible and understandable to other users, incentivize people to use them, improvise and use them, and figure out how to manage them from a network operations standpoint as well as a governance standpoint."
In doing so, DoD hopes to speed up the application development and deployment process, and better target functionality where it is needed. "We have a concept we call 'communities of interest,' in which we get groups of related users together who need those capabilities to actually help define what do the services need to be. We don't want to have to wait and figure out in great detail what those services are before we start providing them. But having that dialog enables us to provide services that are actually responsive to what people need."
There is enormous cost-savings potential as well, especially from an integration standpoint, he added. "For large DoD systems, we often find that each connection costs $1 million a year to maintain -- that's not an exaggeration. When I have to go out pay one big defense integrator and some other second defense integrator to make their systems talk to each other -- and inevitably something changes either in the interconnect or the data standards change -- it ends up being very expensive to have a whole lot of those links. So I'm trying to get that down to where we have a much smaller set of interfaces, rather than a very large set of interconnections."
The name of the game is faster time to delivery, Risacher continued. "We're trying to influence acquisition strategy needs to focus on smaller and shorter deliverables, so we can task as we learn, reduce risks, and get those capabilities out faster. We're focusing on standards and open architecture, and how to share some IT resources. It's a big, difficult shift for an organization as large as defense department."
And the work continues. Next up on the DoD's IT agenda: complex event processing and business activity monitoring, Risacher said.
In the next post, we cover the US Navy's SOA-based enterprise portal approach, discussed by Matt Swartz.
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