Gartner AADI 08 Orlando Wrap Up

Well the conference is winding down and I'm taking an SOA breather to
reflect and exhale. Well I'm actually watching EURO 08 but I am
reflecting.

I have to say that all in all I enjoyed the conference. I especially
enjoyed seeing and meeting the other members of our team. We stay
pretty busy and unless we're together on a job we don't see each other
often.

I was pleased to see that many of the concepts, patterns and processes
presented were not new to me and in fact were things that myself and
the rest of the team already do and apply everyday. Of course there
are always things to learn or new perspectives to discover. I met some
nice folks and had fun in the unsanctioned events as well ;)

Gartner AADI 2008 - Day 3

Gartner AADI - Day 2

Best Practices in Enterprisewide SOA Initiatives presented by Massimo Pezzini

Gartner AADI - The SOA Journey presented by David Lindley

David Lindley from Blue Cross, Blue Shield of Florida presented their SOA journey. One of the many nice things they have done is to create some artifacts that outline their road map and vision. What's even nicer is that they come back to these documents to evaluate their direction and decisions. They have created service request documents, service contracts, documented their service life cycle and put architectural reviews in place for new services requests as well as change requests. The have an intermediary, a registry, a testing solution and a monitoring solution. They defined and published their standards, created development guides for services and even created an EA web portal for all of this information to be disseminated and shared.

This is of course merely the short list of all the work that David and his team have done. They have done a fantastic job of envisioning where they wanted to go and creating the necessary checkpoints and artifacts to get there.

I had the privilege of working with David early last year and while he and his team deserve all the credit for their accomplishments, I'm proud to have been a small part of their efforts. David and the other members of his team are a great example of what can be accomplished when a group of talented and passionate architects get behind SOA.

The other key success criteria required to achieve lasting benefits is enterprise support. It remains to be seen if this criteria is met at Blue Cross. For their sake, I hope they realize what a great team they have and what great work they have done.

Gartner AADI - Service Oriented Development presented by Michael Blechar

Michael described an interest point concerning BPM. When a business unit starts documenting and defining their business process, not only do they start to get value through visibility and repeatability but they quickly start to see the value of SOA. This is due to the fact that once the processes are documented, people will want to fine tune and alter them to accommodate changing requirements or to make them more efficient. They will quickly see that without separating the individual units of work or activities they are not able to achieve this flexibility. Additionally, other units will see the processes and what to utilize them in whole or partially. Again, without the separation and granularity this is not possible.

The bottom line here is that BPM can sell SOA. Thus by supporting and promoting BPM, you will also be exposing the need for SOA.

Gartner AADI – Moving towards Advanced SOA presented by Yefim Natis

An interesting concept is the idea of Software Oriented SOA and Business Oriented SOA. The difference being that one is technology focused and one is not. While it’s never accurate to break things down to only 2 sides, there is some value is evaluating your SOA initiative against this dichotomy.

This difference was noted as a “Thing to Avoid” in Yefim’s morning session here at the AADI conference. A Software Oriented SOA is one which is driven largely by the developers and “techies” as Yefim called them. There is little if any business alignment and services are viewed as software deliverables. A Business Oriented SOA on the other hand blends the technology with the business and views services as business enablers.

The results of these two approaches can and will be drastically different. Without a business focus, most SOA branded activities will ultimately lead to further disconnect and added complexity.

Obviously Yefim’s presentation covered much more than this but this one point resonated with me as I have personally seen instances of both types of SOA initiatives and I think you can guess which ones have been more successful.