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Welcome to another "First Look" podcast. I'm your host, ebizQ Project Manager Gian Trotta. With us today is John Schmidt, Chairman of the Integration Consortium and Senior Vice President Responsible for Enterprise Architecture at Wells Fargo Bank. Welcome, John and thanks for taking the time from a busy schedule to enlighten our readers.

John Schmidt: Thank you, Gian. Love to be here.

Gian Trotta: Okay, John, you've been serving on the board on the Integration Consortium for five years, but last year you took over the reigns as chairman. What impact has the change had on the organization?

JS: Well, I'm not sure just changing from a director to a chairman itself has had a big change but I think it's given me a renewed kind of focus and energy. And more importantly, I think at the same time, or around the same time, it also brought on three additional new board members -- Madeline Bayliss, Ian Foster and Rob Morris. And I think the collection of just some new individuals on the board just re-energized the whole group. And what that's really translated into, I think, is a fresh look for the organization with dramatically increased emphasis on architecture, as kind of a complementary aspect to integration. And a lot more focus on community, on really trying to identify the community of practitioners in the architectural integration space and providing services and capabilities for them. So I think that's very radically different than kind of the first five years of the organization's existence.

GT: Okay. We've been hearing a lot about the exciting growth in the IC "community," which you refer to as "wiki-nomics for architecture and integration." That's a great line and I was wondering what you meant by it.

JS: Yeah, well, wiki-nomics obviously is a new buzzword out there. And it's talking about the economics or the power of community and how communities on the global scale can create economy. And it's being the power of the Internet and the Web that's enabled that. Well, I think in the architecture integration space, the way I think of it, it's almost like enabling outsourcing at the individual level. If you go back to the original view of outsourcing, it was organizations outsourcing or contracting out functions or processes or portions of the company to an outside firm. Well, I think as the whole industry has matured and then technology has taken off, I think individuals are starting to outsource their problem-solving and their own professional development, if you will. And the way they're doing that, is by leveraging things like wikis, blogs, other collaboration events to collaborate in real-time with other individuals. And I think that's what we're seeing as happening, is people are, you know -- you go back 15 years, if an individual practitioner, an IT practitioner inside a company had a problem, they would go to the cubicle next door or the office down the hall or one of the other experts inside the company to help them work through that issue.

In today's world, they go to Google. They go to Wikipedia. They write out their question in their blog and look for their community to respond and help them. So I think they really extended their network of peers to outside the four walls of their company, to really, there are no walls -- anybody in the world could be interacting. And they're taking their problems and their professional challenges to the world. That's what fascinating. And the IC is really trying to help enable that, facilitate that.

GT: All right. I'll say that we're seeing many vendors and SAP is one of them that has founded a pretty large community of their employees, who in turn interact with their clients in the same areas, through wikis and blogs and forums and surveys.

JS: Yeah, there's SAP and a number of other vendors have really jumped on the bandwagon. And we're definitely trying to encourage that well amongst our membership base and our community.

GT: Okay. With the obvious objective, one could be service-oriented architecture, which clearly is a hot button these days. What role is the IC playing in this area?

JS: Well, there's a bunch of things we're doing in the area of SOA. First, of all, we're doing a lot of sharing of best practices. One of the things the IC does on an annual level is we do a call for papers and those papers are then peer-reviewed and selected, and the top ones are selected for publication in a proceedings book, and then the best of those ones are invited to come and present at one of the events that we have around the world.

This year, we've had a lot of papers submitted on SOA. So we're definitely promoting the work, the good work, that's been going on the in the SOA arena that way. We also have a series of conference amongst practitioners, or Webinars, if you will. About every second week, we have the IC SOA conference call. We also do collaboration with other groups. We're working with the SOA Consortium, which is a new group that's formed under the OMG. In fact, the IC was one of the founding organizations that helped launch that group. That was a spin-off from what was previously called the SOA Alliance.

We also have some specific projects between organizations. For example, one is the synergy project that has been going on for some time that is now starting to produce some real tangible results. The synergy project is a collaboration between OMG, the Open Group and the Integration Consortium. And it's really trying to rationalize our model, to figure out how MDA, model-driven architecture, which is an OMG practice, aligns with and performs with TOGAF which is The Open Group's architecture framework.

And the IC is helping facilitate that by bringing some end-user perspective to that whole equation in terms of helping to apply it. And in one of the papers, in fact, that was submitted this year for a call for papers and will be presented at some of the upcoming events is, in fact, a case study on how TOGAF and MDA can be applied in the real world. So that's a real exciting development.

JS: Yeah, in some respects, you know, integration and architecture have always been two sides of the same coin. Architecture is a lot more about structure, frameworks and standards and integration more about the implantation and execution side of the challenges of how you do make large organizations effectively share information in processes in a consistent fashion? So, they've always been there. It hasn't always been acknowledged directly. So that's one of the things. We're trying to just more formally acknowledge that those are, in fact, architecture is in fact a key discipline and aspect of any kind of integration in terms of trying to make organizations work together effectively.

I think unfortunately, in the early days of integration, probably going back to the mid-'90s when middleware as a technology, started to take off and become recognized is, integration became synonymous with EAI, which became synonymous with traditional message-based brokers. So, integration kind of took on this tone that aligned it almost directly with message brokers.

In reality, integration at a business level is really just about getting people to communicate, sharing information across functional areas, serving customers consistently across channels and, in that context, architecture is just as important as the actual middleware components or software tool they might use to implement it. So, hopefully, we're trying to bring a better balance to the equation in recognizing that both of these are critical disciplines to effectively having organizations work smoothly and serve their customers better.

JS: Well, I would hope so. Yeah, some of the statistics about failure rates are very scary. The natural tendency for a lot of organizations to deal with some of those failure rates is to take large projects and break them up with smaller projects. I personally don't happen to feel that, well -- that may in the short term give the appearance of improved success, just because carving a project into a smaller piece and taking more bite-sized pieces seems to have a better chance of success. But it also tends to fragment the problem and create more silos and more standalone solutions, which in the end, actually are hard or just as hard or even harder to integrate, and go smoothly.

Again, this comes back to the importance of architecture. We need to look at our enterprises and as a large enterprise is a system of systems. At the enterprise level, while a specific organization may have 1000 or 2000 application systems, they're all connected. They all run in the same network. They're all sharing information. They're all serving the same customer. We really need to take a look at the entire enterprise of the holistic system to be able to model it effectively and have formal disciplines for how we take this incredible high complexity that exists in today's IT world, break it up into manageable functional components through a disciplined process and through standard architectures, define how those components can come back together and play in an end-to-end business process world.

So, again, I think it comes back to discipline -- and taking a holistic view.

JS: This event is always a terrific event and it just seems to be getting better every year. I think one of the things that we did early on in the first event, is we tried to borrow some concepts from the academic community. And one of the things that the academic community does do very well is peer-review process: make sure that that quality is driven by having peers of the individuals that are presenting, review it and make sure that there's high content.

That was a rather radical notion when we first launched the Global Summit series. And some of the early papers that we submitted were actually quite poor quality and actually had to be rejected. But over the years, I think people have gotten more and more accustomed to it and we're starting to see the quality increase and just the content be very, very impressive.

So that's one thing, is the peer-review process has generated very high-quality event. The Conference proceedings book is probably one of the only, if not the only, peer-reviewed business-oriented journal that is published on an annual basis in the integration and architecture space. And what has ended up resulting is a wide breadth in the topic, everything from soft skills that are presented. For example, partnering ability for understanding your personal style for how you work collaboratively with other individuals, or in terms of thinking styles, how you deal with trust and those sorts of things, to case studies of real-life implementations, to base research that's being done on some new and emerging architectures and thoughts.

So you've got a wide range of topics, all by very exceptional practitioners from around the world. And I think that's what makes this event unique.

From over 50 submissions, the top papers have been chosen to present at the Global Integration Summit in 3 categories:

GT: I understand. Are there any plans to continue this process throughout the year, with updating the subject materials presented or any other special events or activities that the IC is sponsoring?

JS: Yeah. We've got a couple of things going on. After the Global Summit in May, there is a road show and we're taking portions, or kind of a lighter-weight version of the Global Summit, out on the road. Some of the cities that it will be in include Minneapolis, the Twin Cities, New York, Atlanta and this year we're also doing one in Brussels, in combination with the OMG; they'll will be co-hosting an event at the end of the June in Brussels.

In addition, we also have the ongoing peer-review processes and the collaborative events that are happening through webinars and other things to make sure that we continue to spread the knowledge and gather more input on an ongoing permanent basis.

GT: Okay, John. Where can our listeners go on the Web for more information?

JS: Oh, they can go to www.integrationconsortium.org and from there, that will link you through to our collaboration sites and other global integration summit sites and other information, so: www.integrationconsortium.org

GT: Okay! We'll remember it. John, I'd like to thank you for taking time from a very busy schedule to talk at such great length. I think some of the topics you touched upon really merit a review in about three to four months, when I hope you'll join us again.

JS: I would love to.

GT: Great, John! Especially after, probably right after the conference?

JS: Yeah, and you know, if you're interested, if I can share some thoughts on some potential topics, one is Web 2.0 I know is a very exciting topic that's being talked about a lot. Another one that maybe is not talked about as much, but I think is just as exciting is the idea of REST.REST stands for Representation State Transition and it's a more technical description of the architecture of the Internet or of the Web, and there's some current thinking that's been going around circles of how to take the concepts and the architectural principles embedded in REST and apply them to SOA and in corporate settings. I think it's a fascinating topic and I would love to talk to your listeners in the future if you're interested in having me.

GT: Oh, by all means -- that sounds like a way out of the peril of creating too many multiple projects and silos for the Web 2.0 approach sometimes.

JS: Absolutely. If you think about it, the Web is the largest application in the world by many measures and it's been very successful and scaleable to massive levels. And I think there's definitely some lessons we can learn that we can bring back to a corporate setting in a more effective way by learning how the architecture of the web has managed to achieve that.

GT: Right! That's why I think we're all here, basically, in this industry that we all know and love.

JS: Right!

GT: Okay, John. For the readers, you can look into more cutting-edge blogs, podcasts, Webinars and white papers at www.ebizQ.net. I'm Gian Trotta, thanking you all for your time. rn\r\n\r\n')