Listen
to the entire webinar -- or download a podcast for later
playback
Participants in this panel
discussion are
Joe McKendrick (JM);
Dana Gardner (DG); and Phil Wainewright (PW.)
JM: Welcome
everyone to
this ebizQ panel
discussion, the latest in today's SOA in Action virtual conference. I'm
Joe McKendrick, moderator of today's panel and contributor to ebizQ's
SOA in Action site. I'm also a contributor to the ZDNet SOA site. And
before introducing our Webinar and our distinguished speakers today, I
would first like to take a moment to acquaint you with the features and
functions of this trade show, this virtual trade show and presentation.
The trade show is highly interactive and you can chat with company
representatives and other visitors, send business cards, leave messages
and basically, just feel free to browse around the virtual trade show
-- there's a lot to see and do!
About our Panelists
Read Dana Gardner's 'Briefings Direct' blog
on ZDNet
Read Phil Wainewright's 'Software as
Service'
ZDNet blog
More SOA in Action Webinars
1. Replay the Slide Show and Hear the full
Q&A from this Webinar
2. View Replays of all nine of our SOA in
Action Webinars
More ebizQ Webinars
1.
Leverage Federated ESBs to Benefit From a 'SMART SOA's
Date/Time: December 06, 2007, 12:00 PM, EST
(17:00 GMT)
Featured Speakers: Roy Schulte, Vice President
and Distinguished Analyst, Gartner, Inc.; Kevin Anderson, Program
Director, WebSphere, IBM
Objective:Gartner predicts that by 2009,
eighty percent of large companies will have ESBs or similar SOA
infrastructure products from three or more vendors -- but only half of
all large companies will apply a systematic, federated approach to
managing their disparate SOA domains and ESBs. Which half are you in? |
And along with today's panel
discussion,
we'll be taking your
live questions and you'll see on the console in front of you, the gray
console, the "ask-a-question" button. Just click on that and type in
your question and we'd be fielding that. Today's panel discussion is
entitled "SOA and Web 2.0: Mashups, Software-as-a-Service, and
Collaboration: Putting the Pieces Together" and Web 2.0, SOA and the
extension of that, Enterprise 2.0 are something we've been hearing a
lot about through the trade press and analyst community and
essentially, the common denominator, the common ground, appears to be
the delivery of the Web as a platform.
I'm privileged and pleased to
have two very
distinguished
colleagues joining me today. We have Dana Gardner, the president and
principle analyst of Interarbor Solutions and a well-known analyst in
the IT space. Welcome, Dana!
DG:
Thanks, Joe! It's
great to be here.
JM:
And I also should
mention Dana leads
the BriefingsDirect SOA insights series of podcasts, which I have
been honored to join in on and these podcasts feature analysts who
regularly dissect the goings-ons and events shaping the SOA market. And
along with Dana, I'm also pleased to introduce and have with us Phil
Wainewright, an influential commentator and strategist in the emerging
software space. He is a well-known analyst and commentator on
Software-as-a-Service. He's got a ZD.net blog and also was the founder
of the looselycoupled.com Web site. Welcome, Phil!
PW: Glad to be here,
Joe!
JM: Okay! Well,
we're
going to be talking
about SOA vs, or SOA and Web 2.0 and whenever I talk about or think
about the comparisons, the topic of SOA and Web 2.0, I think about the
Apple TV commercial that was playing for some time. You had these two
individuals up there, "Hi, I'm a PC" and "Hi, I'm a Mac" and I think a
great analogy, a fitting analogy would be to have "Hi, I'm a SOA" and
"Hi, I'm Web 2.0."
Of course, the uptight guy in the
corporate
suit is most
likely to be a SOA guy and the cool, laid-back Mac dude is more likely
to be the Web 2.0 guy. And this brings me to the first topic, which I'd
like to discuss with the panelists and there is, there appears to be a
chiasm between the folks that are involved with Web 2.0, the proponents
of Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 by extension, and the SOA types who seem to
be more tied to the backend of the enterprise. Is it fair to say that
the SOA folks and the Web 2.0 folks come from two different worlds? Do
you see them being in two separate camps or are we seeing convergence
between these two groups within enterprises? And, Dana, why don't we
start off with you? Get your thoughts on that.
DG: Sure, Joe,
thanks! I
think they're both
heading in the same direction but they're coming from different
perspectives. Different cultures. And, you know, one of the terms that
I've heard recently that I liked even better than Web 2.0 or
Web-oriented architecture is "guerilla SOA," meaning that small groups
of people, fleet, working with lightweight architecture and tools
can accomplish an awful lot when it comes to green field development of
services and when it comes to down-and-dirty projects to do
integration, compositing and to basically solve the problem of the day
on an ad hoc basis.
But at the same time, of course, we
have a
30- or 40-year
legacy of resources, infrastructure, application stacks that all need
to be brought into the mix as well. So, to me, these actually are quite
complementary, even if they're on separate tracks and operate through
really separate cultures and mindsets. And they are both trying to free
up resources and give end users the data and the transactions and the
logic that they need to get the work done. And if they both operate on
that basis, I think that they are actually going to meet up somewhere,
someday, in a very, perhaps, productive way.
JM: Phil, you've
been
following this market
for longer than anybody I know, actually, at this point -- especially
the Web services and, by extension, SOA. Is, did you see this
phenomenon taking place in the early days of Web services, we'll call
it the "pre-SOA architectures" in the early part of the decade?
PW: Well, yeah, very
much
so. I think that
some, there was a time when SOA was seen as very emergent and perhaps
threatening and I know you've written, Joe, about they're just a bunch
of Web services phenomenon in which people kind of start of do
point-to-point Web service integration and perhaps end up with a whole
spaghetti mess of uncoordinated, ungoverned SOA, perhaps not worthy of
the name architecture.
And, of course, I think that's the fear
around Web 2.0 that
because it's emergent and by their nature, emergent technologies are
chaotic, uncontrolled, ungovernable, there's this sense that you don't
really want them in your nicely cultivated, managed service-oriented
architecture in case it kind of ruins the show. So, I'm a little bit
less optimistic than Dana because I think it's going to be a few years
before Web 2.0 and SOA really co-exist simply because Web 2.0 is so
ill-defined and people are still using it to experiment rather than
with a definitive purpose and there's certainly no real kind of best
practice at the moment.
DG: Well, I think
that
there's probably
more pessimism to had when these would co-exist in the same
organization, but what I'm actually pretty keen on is the notion that
these are going to co-exist in the marketplace, because I think there's
an opportunity now for disruption. The smaller companies that can be
capitalized for much less money than in the past, that can start up and
go into existing markets and work much more quickly than to help
customers or users acquire services and to gain some productivity and
business benefit, but without having to drag along the legacy of IT
infrastructure and to avail themselves of services off the wire
increasingly and the ability to host themselves cheaply and such things
as what Amazon is providing with elastic cloud.
So if that happens, then we have a
situation
in the
marketplace where there's a great deal of disruption from small
start-ups that can work in almost like we saw in the 80s with pirates,
corporate raiders that would come in and break companies up and sell
the parts, it's almost the same notion of a raider or a pirate
mentality I would think for small Web 2.0 services-oriented
organizations and if that's the case, that's going to compel and force
the bigger companies to adopt these sorts of practices.
PW: Yes, I think
that I
would agree with.
Because I think looking back to the early days of SOA, all of the
vendors at the onset were fairly small vendors. You know, people like
HP and IBM and Microsoft kind of talked about SOA, got involved in
establishing the standards quite heavily but really didn't have
convincing products to offer the market, particularly not in the SOA
management space.
So it was down to vendors like Actional
and
AmberPoint and Systinetwho were out there, Cape Clear is another one,
were out
there and actually kind of being the companies, the vendors, that were
being picked up by the early adopters who actually wanted to kind of
use the technology for the competitive advantage. Subsequently, of
course, a significant number of those vendors were actually bought up
and became part of larger organizations as the bigger vendors got
involved.
So -- exactly. We're going to see the
same
thing happening
with Web 2.0. The organizations, the enterprises, are actually going to
be the early adopters and gain competitive advantage, are going to have
to take risks with relatively untried start-up vendors because those
are the vendors who actually have got the tools.
DG: And we also have
to
remember that SOA
is a methodology. And therefore, it's not just suppliers that are going
to be playing this game. It's going to be the companies and start-ups
that are filling needs in the market. We hear a lot of talk about a
bubble in the Web 2.0 environment, lots of start-ups, and they compare
it to what happened six, seven, eight years ago in the first Web, the
Internet craze, and the dot com bubble. But the amount of money that
has been invested in these start-ups is much less than it was in the
past because they can actually get up on their feet and running for far
less money, and I think that has to do with new methodologies around
service orientation, infrastructure as a service, hosting as a service
and a dramatic reduction on the total cost of getting up and running
with what is a widget or application or a service, or something like
Facebook, which of course has taken off so quickly and has reached
almost dizzying potential market capitalization. That couldn't have
been done ten or fifteen years ago, based on the architectures that
were available.
PW: Yeah, that's
absolutely right. But
also, of course, what, the development tools are there. But what
they're trying to develop is a lot less challenging, you know, putting
together a wiki platform is not as hard as putting together a scaleable
monitoring infrastructure that can track Web services across an
organization.
DG: Well, that's the
point, isn't it? To
come up with something small but productive that you can use quickly
and not necessarily think about a six-to-eighteen month production
process, to come up with something like forty pages of requirements.
It's really about simplifying but it also allows for people to get work
done and for sharing, and if more small companies do that, it makes
those APIs and SDKs available, then they can build into an
ecology of these services and therefore, really could be a much simpler
way of approaching IT solutions, problem-solving, rather than just
thinking about as SOA. It could really be a new way that people can
build out IT process-driven productivity.
PW: But are all the
guys
that run IT
actually going to be comfortable with that?
DG: Probably not.
PW: I mean, we've
seen
what they've done
with SOA. And they've turned service-oriented architecture into this
huge infrastructure project that takes years to come to fruition and a
very --
DG: -- yeah.
PW: The business
people
don't really kind
of get much of a look in on what's going on. And the same as Web 2.0,
it's the business people kind of their revenge.
DG: The barbarians
at the
gate, right?
PW: (laughs) Yeah.
JM: It's
interesting.
Dana mentioned the
ability to start businesses pretty much on a low IT budget and kind of
get around the need for huge infrastructure. I'm familiar with the case
of a music cataloging service that was able to grab hold of Amazon's S3
storage system and as the elastic compute cloud scaleable processing
services and essentially start its business up with an eighty-three
dollar investment in IT.
DG: Sure, so if I'm
a
department manager.
I'm running remote office. Where I'm a sales or a marketing executive
and I see these sort of things happening, I can wait in line for six or
twelve months for my IT department to satisfy me? Or I can hire a
couple of college kids and go out and do something like that. Joe, what
do you think I'm gonna do?
JM: Right. The
college
kids. The low
barrier to entry.
DG: And if my
company
says, "Hey, you can't
do that, we'll close you down," I might just go quit and go and start
my own company, right?
JM: Right. You know,
this
is something --
SOA has always been a rather difficult to explain to executives, to
explain to the business people. I mean, once they get it, you know,
their eyes light up and they realize that this is something that can
help streamline their operations and give them more agility. But until
then, it's a complicated concept. But when we talk about these
on-demand applications, the Software-as-a-Service, the Facebook.com
type of services you can tap into over the Internet on an instant, this
is something the business gets right away.
And one thing I've always wondered, is
why
or can SOA itself,
can your SOA operation be considered an internal Software-as-a-Service.
In other words, you have Software-as-a-Service, this is something that
Software-as-a-Service is taking place within the bounds of organization
and the findings departments, HR, or whoever, can tap into whatever
costs, chargeback formula you have, and tap into these services, as
easily as they could something from the outside. What do you think?
Phil, you're our --
PW: I think it's a
great
vision. I think
there are some kinds of practical pieces missing in terms of making it
happen. But, I think, first of all, step back for a sec. People have
been talking about the notion of the global SOA, the Web as a global
SOA in which you can kind of pick and choose services that you use.
And, so, I think it's quite natural to think of an enterprise SOA as a
microcosm of that.
Well, that's fine in principle. But
(a), I
mean you talked
about charging for usage curve, for example. The infrastructure for
doing that
is very, very -- is in it's infancy, which is why the majority of
Software-as-a-Service providers are still doing per use or per month
subscriptions because that is a very simple thing to administer. It's
still actually quite complicated when you're actually running a
business and people are kind of dropping off and joining and so on.
It's probably harder than you think at
first
glance. But
that's just the simplest way of charging for a service. If you get into
an enterprise environment where, you want to charge people for
their use of resources rather than simply per use or per month. You'll
find that there are very few software tools out there who will allow
you to automate that process in an effective way. So that's one of the
barriers to that.
But I think the other barrier is that
how
many IT managers
really want to open up the, how many CIOs want to open up all of the
internal services they office to a competitive marketplace? Surely, the
idea of that you're going to empower users to start building this
budget for, to choose between the services that you offer and the
services which are out there in the marketplace. Venture-funded
services quite often launch the kind of services that you have to kind
of battle for a share of the budget to support. Then, you're probably
going to feel that the odds are stacked against you. And you'll end up
in a situation where you're being criticized for losing users and you
haven't got the budget to actually be able to support them in a
competitive way.
DG: Well, you know
one of
the things that's
inherent with SOA is, that it requires change. And that's often deep
and penetrating and difficult to change. And people being what they
are, are often resistant to change. Most by nature. And so we need
incentives. We need carrots and we need sticks in order to get IT
people and business people to come together more on the solutions that
are not to complicated, not too costly, that don't taken too much time
but actually significant work done and efficiency and productivity
moving along.
And one of the things we discussed a
while
ago is this notion
of a market competition. Smaller up-starts undercutting the larger,
older companies and that would be, I suppose, somewhat of a stick that
you have to change and you have to do things differently in your IT
department or you're going to lose your job because your company is
going to go out of business. So there's some sticks out there in the
market that will propel change towards SOA methodologies and Web 2.0
activities that also have to be carrots.
And I think what we're discussing, Joe,
is
this notion of
putting the market forces or economics that tend to work in an open
environment and apply that to a corporate environment. So that IT is
not seen so much as a cost center but if you pay for what you get,
you're gonna demand better service and accountability will be more
direct. Budgeting will be more predictable and IT services will be
consumed rather than you waiting in line to get them almost like a
hand-out from a bureaucracy, like a government transfer or social
program.
So in a sense, we are trying to change
what
is in some ways a
welfare system in organizations and how IT is dispensed and acquired
and used, and create more of a down and competitive, lean, mean
productivity machine. And so again, we're going to need to look at
sticks. We're going to need to look at carrots. And that's why SOA is
transformative in how it affects a company. That means HR has to get
involved. Politics needs to be taken into account. A buy-in from the
top as well as the bottom so grassroots activities as well as dictates
from the corporate offices. This is why SOA is so impactful for a lot
of organizations and really will cut across them and is about business
transformation.
But you have to remember those sticks
out
there, that if you
don't transform, the marketplace will transform around you and you'll
be left at a disadvantage.
JM: Those companies
settle with legacy
systems, proprietary silos, they can't get information to the decision
makers, to the line employees, will find themselves increasingly
being held behind by other companies that make use of these new tools
and new paradigms.
DG: Yeah, I think
so. And
this doesn't have
to be an issue where you're out of business. We've seen change in the
past happen many times. The last 50 or 100 years, as a culture, as a
society, as a world, we've dealt with fantastic change. And many times,
quite well. So I would expect that inside of organizations, they create
what, you know, is sometimes referred to as skunk works, where you try
these methodologies out. And you apply them in a small scale, and you
crawl and then you walk and you run and you apply them more broadly.
The notion of a total
horizontally-deployed
SOA activity
sounds very unlikely unless you're a small company and can make these
sorts of dictates that everyone will do blank and they will, but for a
large organization, it is about carrots and sticks, it's about cultural
politics and it's about incentives. So I would think that SOA would
start small and Web 2.0 will start small but they can complement one
another in terms of creating a germ, or a seed, in these organizations,
show a better way and then adoption can take place over a period of
time.
PW: Yeah, I think
that
organizational
politics of this is very important. It's crucial. That, on the one
hand, I think that the people who are responsible for governing IT need
to be reassured by management, by senior management, that their
concerns are understood. That the reasons why they're resisting change
are often founded in concerns about good practice. But at the same
time, I think that they need to be relaxed in accepting of the Web 2.0
experimentation that's taking place. And recognize that because it's
emergent, is just not going to be as manageable and as controllable as
the established mainstream applications that are already in place.
I think we probably need to talk about
the
role of governance,
because that's a big issue in making it happen. But it's a whole topic
to itself. But that's a tool to be employed by the senior management of
the organization. I think it drives home that unless this is driven by
the people who run and own the company, and unless they have really
understood the upheaval and business change management that's involved,
that there's a great deal of scope for it to go awry.
JM: And, Phil, you
brought up a good point.
The whole area of governance. We have basically two evolutionary,
revolutionary, however you want to consider it, paradigms that are
reshaping the way we manage technology, manage our organizations and
technology, SOA and Web 2.0. I'd like to kind of work our way to this
whole governance idea.
One thing that the two paradigms, I'll
call
them "paradigms,"
I don't like that word. But I can't think of another word to describe
it at this point. The two paradigms have in common is this idea of
mash-ups. Okay? You have Web 2.0 with collaborative applications, the
Facebook stuff, and blogs and wikis and so forth, and there's SOA with
composite applications. But it seems when you talk about the mash-ups.
That's the common ground. That's where the two areas intersect. That's
where Web 2.0 and SOA intersect.
Application mash-ups bear a striking
resemblance, in fact, to
composite applications that are part of many SOA efforts. Both
techniques involve the rapid development and deployment of new
applications that pull data from multiple sources across the network.
We saw with, you know, on the consumer side, Google maps based services
and a lot of organizations are looking at applying this type of
mash-ups to their front ends to provide a better picture of what their
data is telling them.
What's the -- now, the idea behind
mash-ups
is that end users
can design their own front end applications. The mash-ups, you don't
need an IT person necessarily, a trained developer to put these front
end applications together. And it certainly makes sense that end users
should take responsibility for their own software and applications
because the IT department typically is very overworked and has a lot to
think about.
First of all, is this a good thing? Is
end
user design
applications a good thing? And how is Web 2.0 and SOA, the convergence
of these two, enabling this phenomena?
DG: Well, Joe,
you've got
a long going
there in that question.
JM: I know --
DG: It's a
long-winded
question. There's a
couple of things going on here. One, is there's a technical discussion
about how you would go about creating the interfaces and you would
relate back to backend services. And there's somewhat of a debate
around whether you'd want to do that in a, oh I don't know, more of a
Web-based way where you're using http and SOAP and REST and XML and so
you try to keep it at a very lightweight and loosely-coupled level.
Or you can have more top-to-bottom
modeling
based approaches
where you have services made available and they can be composited using
tools and business process modeling standards and something that would
make more sense, I supposed in a large ERP type of an environment. So
we can have a discussion about which technological approach makes sense
and which conditions and what kind of companies based on their legacy
and their use and their skill sets.
But the larger issue, I think here is
really
just a notion of
conceptualizing the ability of people to be able to put things together
fairly quickly without having to go through an IT developer
requirements process. So you give a palette, let's say, of services and
people can start, whether they are business analysts or whether they're
line of business people or perhaps even knowledgeable, powerful end
users, perhaps, folks that have come up in more recent years through
use of technology and are familiar and comfortable with it.
And that's where I think the
productivity
issues are. So how
we go about it is still going to be up for debate and is going to vary
a lot. But the fact that we can empower people to take more of a role
in crafting business processes, or amending business processes, or
being innovative and creative and thinking out of the box without
having to go through a committee. That could unleash quite a bit of
creative power and energy but the downside of that is it could be very
chaotic.
So the real issue, is how do we capture
the
creativity without
being penalized by the chaos? And it's a balancing act between allowing
people to be accessing and mashing up different services, data sets,
access and privilege to content and RSS feeds, for example. And at the
same time, putting this in some kind of a box where we can apply policy
perhaps or rules of engagement. Who decides who can do it and who can't
and under which circumstances and if you do it, who can you share it
with, that's really what we are up against. So we are seeing a lot of
action and momentum in the market around vendors and suppliers trying
to come up with the means to unleash the creativity but keep it
somewhat sane.
JM: And perhaps
apply
some of the
governance methodologies and technologies that we're developing for
SOA? Can that be applied to Web 2.0? Should we go to the Web 2.0 folks
and say, "Hi, I'm from the governance committee and I'm here to help?"
DG: Well, you know,
I
would hate to think
that we're going to have a different policy, governance and overall
management capability at different levels of an organization or at
different levels of this creative process. That, to me, is another
recipe for layers of complexity that don't relate that will require
integration.
I'd rather see a top-to-bottom
comprehensive, flexible policy
approach so that single policies can apply across different types of
activities and groups, and really you have to be somewhat automated.
Otherwise, just the management becomes so complex that it bogs down any
of the creative opportunity.
So, this is the challenge in the market
now
and so far, we've
been doing this with basically the equivalent of you know, snearkerware
and wetware. You
walk across the room with a floppy disc or you just use your best
judgment and allow, you know, no one gets penalized for being creative
until it becomes a problem and they get reigned in. So perhaps that's
the level that we're at now.
But ultimately, for this to scale, for
it
become something
that works in the consumer environment or user-generated types of
activities for it to be deployed widely in corporations, it's going to
need to scale. Therefore, it's going to require automation but it's
going to require something that's simple and comprehensive across
policy. So, event-driven types of activities. That's what we're looking
for right now, a solution to this credible problem. Because we can see
creativity already but we know that we can go only so far with it in
the current technological and business process environment.
PW: You know, I'd
like to
leap in with a
couple of observations at this point, if I may. Because I think IT
people sometimes talk as though no business process innovation ever
happens unless it happens in the IT system. And that's completely
wrong. And, in fact, mash-ups and business process innovation have been
happening in the enterprise since the beginning of time. And, you know,
a lot of it happens in Excel spreadsheets, for example. People do
mash-ups with different data sources in Excel spreadsheets but they do
it by cutting and pasting, because the data feeds are not available to
them. So they have no choice but to do that. They're doing business
processes that involve walking around the corner with output
of one program to key it into another program on someone else's desk
because the integration hasn't been provided.
But there are huge amounts of
innovation
already being done by
people who just need to get their work done. And are having to innovate
or work around the limitations of the IT.
DG: That's the story
of the PC, isn't it?
PW: Yeah, exactly.
And
that is, and so
that's one of the reasons why IT has to let Web 2.0 emerge, has got to
let users start to do this. So that they can see what the problems are
that users are trying to address. And then they can understand what
needs to be introduced on a more formal basis. And they also need to
see what they need to have governance over. I think the difficulty and
one of the problems that we had, I think where the SOA has been rolled
out in organizations over the past few years, is that it's been done
without enough understanding of what the business users actually needed
to do with the system. What automation they actually needed. What
business process integration they actually needed.
And, therefore, perhaps it does not
channel
the investment
into the right areas. I think you've got to allow a certain amount of
chaos and a certain amount of guerilla activity in order to
identify what the business is actually kind of most in need of.
DG: Yeah, I
certainly
agree with that. You
know, Joe, you mentioned earlier the commercial about "Hi, I'm a PC and
I'm a Mac," well -- twenty years ago there was a commercial of somebody
running down an aisle with a big hammer and Big Brother was the object
of their breaking down barriers.
PW: That was a Mac
ad as
well, wasn't it?
DG: Yes, it was, it
was
from Apple --
PW: But that was
against,
that was against
Big Blue at the time, IBM.
DG: That was against
the
mainframe. And so
now we're looking at, Okay, well perhaps there are these services and
mash-ups and interfaces and new creativity that can be had on the
network, of, for and by the network, that in a sense is competing
against what seems slow and difficult and complex in the distributed
computing environment. And that's kind of the same tension that is now
bubbling up and look what happened when the PCs were allowed in. Sure,
there was chaos. It was added cost of constant battle, you know, to
build networks and develop bandwidth but the productivity that was
unleashed for the last twenty years in the global economy has been
astonishing. So pitfalls and risks, yes, but huge pay-off potentially,
too.
PW: Yeah. I think
that
new technologies
never emerge fully-formed. And I think we have to give them space to
deliver their benefit and allow for a little bit of kind of rough
edges. I mean, as we saw with the PC. They, first of all, they were
resisted. Then everyone thought they were wonderful. Then Gartner came
out with a TCO report and people thought, "Oh, we better manage these
guys." That's the same process we will go through precisely with Web
2.0 and I guess that Gartner's TCO report on the cost of ownership of
Web 2.0 is due in about three years' time.
DG: Right! And just
as
mainframes are still
with us and are very productive, and you can modernize the software
investment that you've made in a mainframe on new hardware and more
cost-efficient standardized platform, I should think the same effect
will happen as well when mash-ups and Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0
activities will complement the distributed legacy environments, so that
there's an opportunity here as we said earlier for a complementary
nature. It's not us and them. It's both. But it's how do you manage
your culture, your environment and your opportunities, to take
advantage of both.
JM: And it's
probably
fair to say that
while, you know, we could look at it as IT vs business wanting these
Web 2.0 tools, typically, I find that these IT people that will adopt a
lot of these new technologies for their own purposes and own
productivity very early on in the process. That as IT people, that
we're bringing PCs into the company back in the 1980s to do their own
work and their own pilots and experimentation and that's one of the, in
fact, when we talk about convergence of Web 2.0 and SOA, I see that as
a major productivity point. The collaborative capabilities, the blogs,
wikis and social networking sites that Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 brings
in, is something that the architects, the developers, the integration
specialists can all use to work together better and build SOA.
PW: Yes, you know,
Joe,
that reminds me of
something. That a couple of years ago, people were starting to get more
sophisticated about SOA governance and talking about repositories as
well as registries. Because what they were finding was the amount of
documentation that was required to actually allow people to choose and
implement the service that they needed, was quite a bit more than just
an entry into an UDDI registry. And at the same time, Salesforce.com
and AppExchange. And it was almost as though AppExchange (37:18), which
was a directory of complementary applications and services that you can
call up and use with your core Salesforce.com application, it
was almost as though that was a kind of Web 2.0 type spin on the SOA
repository.
Now, the reason I tell that story is
because
I think that we
need to look at, in this new era, we need to look at kind of governance
2.0 and discovery 2.0 because you need to help people to find and start
using these emerging services but in a way that is adapted to the needs
of a much more open environment for exchanging services and picking up
resources.
DG: Phil -- correct
me if
I'm wrong, but it
seems that Salesforce.com and AppExchange really is an example of
trying to reach that balance between openness, creativity, flexibility
and at the same time, some control, command and policy. And, --
PW: -- Well, yeah. I
mean, obviously, you
have to run on a Salesforce.com platform to fall in with that. But I
think there's some interesting stuff going on there, like the ability
to rate or you know, to vote for particular services on the AppExchange
to kind of comment on them. So that users can help each other to
understand which are the useful ones, perhaps kind of mention what they
like about a service, what they don't like about a service. Now, you
could imagine that kind of thing being brought into an enterprise SOA
repository, and it would be pretty useful.
DG: Right. So an
enterprise might dictate,
this is the platform you will use. These are the frameworks that are
available. Here are the developer skills that you will line up behind.
However, we're going to put a wiki on the front of it. We'll have a
social network approach. Governance and oversight will become, you
know, much more flexible so it's when we bring sort of social
networking benefits to what was otherwise a command-and-control
decision-making process that sort of again gets closer to that balance
of creating --
PW: -- Yeah, and I
think
that the great
power of that is that it means that if you are not doing things right.
If you are not giving people enough freedom or if they kind of really,
really want to use some stuff that you are not allowing, then instead
of them going off and voting with their feet, you can actually read
that complaint and maybe have a dialogue with them because of the
collaborative nature of this Web 2.0 environment.
DG: Sure, as we all
know
as bloggers that
that's a very important part of what we do. Our word is not the last
word. It's really kind of the first word. And then it gets vetted. And
there's thumb's up and thumb's down and there's comments and there's
linking and tagging and sending it off to someone else to look at. And
there's in this sense, the wisdom of the crowd that's applied to this
one piece of information or a thought or a concept. It's quite
powerful. And very quickly, something is either viewed and used as
creative and beneficial or it's tossed out and discarded, but no great
loss, you move on and start something else and do it again.
And that's that same, I think,
methodology
of social
interaction that we're now trying to bring into SOA because it's
probably the only way that we can manage the complexity of this policy
requirement.
JM: Great! You know,
I
saw on the recent
transcript of one of your podcasts, the wisdom of the crowd was applied
to new acronym WOA, wisdom-oriented architecture.
DG: That's right! I
think
it was Jim Kobielus.
JM: Jim Kobielus,
okay!
He's
good with those
acronyms.
DG: Yeah, right. Or,
he
liked also the
water foundation oriented-architecture because it really is, you know,
what do people talk about at that few minutes when they're not
concentrating on work when they could be creative, they could be
social, when they could compare and contrast what the organization
socially is thinking and doing. So that also applies to what we're
talking about. It can't just be command-and-control. IT is too
complicated, being fleet in the market or being agile on how you
create solutions for your customers is too difficult to put it through
a bureaucratic top-down kind of control-and-command environment. It
needs to be opened up but it needs to be done so with some, you know,
risk reduction and I suppose governance.
JM: And what we are
seeing in
organizations, especially over the past few decades have been a
breaking down of the hierarchy, pushing decision-making close to the
line employees who are directly involved with the projects or with the
customer.
DG: You know,
there's not
going to be
one-size-fits-all. There's going to be different companies that have
different cultures. And some companies are going to highly centralized
and some are going to be decentralized. There's, of course, also
cultural differences from nation to nation and country to country.
Where, there's a certain cultural emphasis on being less
confrontational. In some cultures, I don't belong to that one, but
there are also other cultures where, you know, spirited discussion and
throwing it all up on the wall and tearing it apart is acceptable.
So there are going to be different
approaches to this. But
what's important is that we can apply more fluidly, more flexibly,
different ways of social and group interaction with the whole process
of building, using and adjusting IT. And so, you know, due to suppliers
perhaps. Due to just the evolution of IT, in the past twenty or thirty
years, that flexibility has either been missing from the get-go or it's
been lost and now's the time to allow for different companies to have
different approaches to how problem solutions come about and that IT is
not an afterthought but is integral to that process, start to finish.
PW: Yeah, I think
it's
all about
communication, really -- isn't it? And I think the great thing about
these Web 2.0 technologies is that they just automate communication and
collaboration so that it just makes it easier for people to work
together. Now, I think that in the course of this conversation, we've
touched on some really important ways in which IT themselves can
harness with 2.0 to have a better dialogue with the consumers of IT.
Within an organization. And I think that any IT function that really
grabs hold of that and starts to use Web 2.0 to do their own jobs
better will, by doing that, obviously build the competence of people
elsewhere in the organization when they do get Web 2.0 so they're not
going to be obstructive. That they're going to be supportive of what
other departments like customer services and sales and marketing,
manufacturing, whoever are doing with those technologies.
DG: Yeah, I would
say
that a lot of IT
departments are already doing some of these things with their help
desks. Where they are allowing the help desk personnel, they're taking
incoming tickets and dealing with problems, to go out and do Google
searches and find solutions or to create their own frequently asked
questions and contribute the knowledge back into a general pool, or a
wiki, or a repository that's open and collaborative. You know, that's
how you can manage the complexity of dealing with a huge help desk
operation. You can apply that more generally across other aspects of
IT.
JM: Okay, great.
Great!
Dana, Phil -- I'm
afraid we've run out of time. This has been a terrific discussion and
we really, you guys have really done a great job of connecting the dots
and showing which dots still need to be connected between the world of
Web 2.0 and SOA. And we really appreciate you being able to come aboard
and provide your insights.
PW: Well, it's been
a
pleasure. Thanks very
much, Joe.
JM: Sure!
DG: I think it has
to do
with our haircuts,
Phil and I.
JM: (laughs) Okay,
great!
And we -- just a
couple of housekeeping things. We actually have some winners for our
drawing. Our listeners were entered into a drawing to receive four of
the bestselling books around integration and SOA and I'll just read
down the list of the winners here: First, is K. Morro of Goodyear. They
will receive a copy of Enterprise Integration: The Essential Guide to
Integration Solutions by Beth Gold-Bernstein and that's ebizQ's own and
William Ruh. Next, is M. Engstrom from FedEx Freight Service is
receiving a
copy of Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology and Design
by Thomas Erl, a very prolific author here in the space. We have C.
Haggard from the New York State Department of Labor, who is receiving a
copy of SOA for Dummies. That's a fantastic book, everyone should get a
hold of that one. And finally, we have B. Murphy from Verizon, SOA for
the Business Developer: Concepts, BPEL and SVA by Ben Margolis.
And I just want to remind our listeners
as
well that I
encourage you to go out and check out the SOA in Action virtual trade
fair and for every virtual booth you visit, you will automatically be
entered into a drawing for an Apple iPhone, the ultimate client end
user device. And, again, I want to thank our listeners. I thank
everyone for joining in today. And I want to thank our distinguished
panelists, Dana Gardner and Phil Wainewright. We certainly appreciate
having you aboard with us today.
DG: Great, my
pleasure.
Thank you.
PW: Thanks very
much,
Joe.
Listen
to the entire webinar -- or download a podcast for later
playback
JM:
Okay, great job!