Business Transformation in Action

There's been a lot of talk in recent years about the need for great architecture to make great SOA. Along these lines, Michael Poulin reminds us that architects aren't such bad guys, they are here to change, create, and, of course, architect. Michael states that he is finishing the year "with a call to all Business and Technical Architects to do our job - to architect, to leave Designers their 'bread', to drive management to the right things, and to preserve and guard the business objectives and strategies by all means."

Janne Korhonen talked more about enterprise architecture, pointing out that business strategy should not be a part of great architecture. "Enterprise architecture is essentially a set of descriptive representations of the enterprise's present and future states in terms of its (systemic) organization and structure. These representations are comprised of abstractions that can be described in discrete symbolic terms and handled using formal logical thinking."

HP's Kelly Emo provided her perspectives on what to expect in SOA over the coming year, and makes these predictions:

• More investment in governance
• More integration between service development and service delivery
• More investment in SOA testing and quality management
• More teamwork to make service-orientation work
• More trust between IT and the business
  

We also had a lot of great commentary from the community on the question of whether SOA and Agile go together.  There was a lot of disagreement as to whether they are a good match. Miko Matsumura, for example, pointed out that "the philosophy of Agile as a software development methodology has a lot to teach those in the SOA Adoption business.... Agile and the Continuous Improvement paradigm of BPM are both based on the idea of short cycle times to improvement and reducing the risk of incomplete knowledge. The idea that you can have the 'target state' completely known before you begin implementation and have that remain constant through to the end of the process is improbable in complex dynamic systems."

JP Morgenthal said the mix of SOA and Agile reminded him of mixing Mac-n-Cheese with Candy Corn in a single dish -- both good on their own, but...  Joel York, however, said "chocolate and peanut butter" are a better match, tasting great and working well together.

We're also pleased to welcome Dr. Mani Chandy of CalTech to the ebizQ community. Mani brought event processing into the business mainstream. In his latest post, he talks about his PC-cubed formula for developing smart, sense-and-respond systems: Price, Performance, Pervasiveness, Celerity, Connectedness, and Complexity.

Brenda Michelson also is bullish on event processing, predicting that 2010 will see the rise of the "Real-Time Web," more proliferation of sensors and chips, and more event-driven processing all around.