The role of SOA Governance in Legacy Modernization - Part 1

Submitted by John Fitzgerald. System Architects

Legacy modernization, through service-enablement of legacy systems, is a key driver in helping organizations implement a Service-oriented Architecture (SOA). However, legacy modernization should always go hand-in-hand with SOA governance. Presuming that a decision has been made to pursue service-enablement, the good news is that developers and even business users now have a number of tools at their disposal to open up legacy systems. This is also the bad news.

With various tools (in skilled or unskilled hands) producing services in different ways and based upon different legacy system layers, the potential is strong for a disorderly mish-mash of services popping up throughout the organization. Below are five problem areas that could appear when an unmanaged herd of new services works its way into the company's SOA projects:

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Business Transformation Conference

Submitted by kswenson. System Architects.

I just spent a week in Washington DC at the Business Transformation Conference put on by Transformation+Innovation. It is a small conference, but an amazing collection of speakers. For example:

• Dennis Wisnosky who is the Chief Technology Officer of the Department of Defense and he talked about his challenges of using SOA and BPM to transform the IT infrastructure of a $500B organization. One key point he made was to "work with platoons (8 people), not battalians."
• Dale Meyerrose, the Associate Director of National Intelligence and Chief Information Officer, spoke about efforts to integrate informations systems across the intelligence agencies. He says "ultimately, all problems are people problems." He also gave the advice: "Think Big, Start Small, Fail Small, Fail Small, Fail Small, Succeed Small, Scale Fast."
• Paul Strassman, the George Mason University Distinguished Professor of Information Sciences, (Former Chief Information Officer of Xerox) spoke about how HP was using SOA to cut the total number of enterprise applications deployed to one quarter as many, decreasing IT budget spend, while at the same time being more productive. Did you know that HP is now bigger than IBM?
• Jon Pyke, president of Process Factory gave an entertaining talk about refocussing business processes back on humans. He used the first six minutes of his speach to play a video which everyone should really watch, and think about: http://www.mkpress.com/ShiftExtremeGoogle.html.

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BPM and SOA - Marriage that will end up in divorce if not done correct

Submitted by orajiv. System Architects

BPM promotes model based definition that ensures business gets exactly what they ask for. BPM enables business to identify what IT services are required to automate their business processes. So from my perspective, BPM centric approach helps to avoid wasting time, resource and cost by identifying the portfolio of service components that are required to be truly exposed as "services". What i have read and heard so far is that SOA vendors propoganda about the need for "service enabling" all the IT applications. What is the point of creating 1000's of services if only very few are needed by the business, infact in certain cases you find the one that really had to be built as service do not exisit. SOA today is seen as an IT initiative to respond quickly to changing bussiness requirements. But I strongly belive that SOA should be a business driver because business understands the process, and once process is mapped out it clearly identifies what IT services are required to accomplish those business goals. This information should then be used by IT to prioritize their SOA projects and not the other way around.

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SOA and Governance

Submitted by John Fitzgerald. System Architects

When we look at application development, there are typically two camps involved - the users of the applications and the developers who build them. In the past, these groups only interacted when they had to - i.e. something need to be built or something had to be fixed.

Historically, application development can be summarized like this: users identify a need for a new application. The developers receive a set of requirements and start building the application. Developers integrate existing and new applications, sometimes with chewing gum and duct tape, and deliver a new application (that is often outdated and inflexible).

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InfoWorld: A Product Management Approach to SOA

Submitted by sfroman. Business Analysts, System Architects

By InfoWorld's David L. Margulius

"Deploying an enterprise-wide SOA is not just about developing and deploying components and services -- it's about changing the DNA and culture of IT to become more product-management oriented."

Read the article in InfoWorld.