Enterprise Abstraction

SOA Ideas for 2007

Dion Hinchcliffe has a very interesting post entitled Eleven Emerging Ideas for SOA Architects in 2007.  I really like Dion's list, particularly the idea of SOA being enabled more directly to the user.  He suggests that making services consumable in the browser (via REST or similar), making AJAX the face of your SOA, providing access to SOA services via widgets.  In other words, he's recommending starting to externalize SOA in different ways more directly to the end user.  This is an idea for which I'm very much in favour.

He also mentions the statistic that 48% of CIOs will be looking to actually start using their SOAs to connect to external partners this year.

This gives me hope.  We've spent the last 2-3 years building architecture and communicating SOA, followed by our first real SOA/EA based projects.  We're just now reaching a place where we'll have services available internally, and ready for the acid tests of reuse (let's see).  In my opinion, it's taken about 3 years for us to be poised to be seriously considering extending/exposing portions of our SOA in various ways.  The 48% stat makes me think we're in a good place on the curve, particularly for a small organization.

SOA and Agile - effective teams

Steve Jones provides a succinct and rational approach to breaking large projects into smaller, more effective efforts by applying SOA on top of Agile methods.  Essentially he suggests breaking down the components and services as work packages that are able to be completed by a small (4-6 person) team, and managing the work packages. 

A simple, rational, and as he explains, a time-honoured approach.

Transitional Architecture

An interesting article from IEEE's IT Professional journal entitled ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE - Transitional Architectures for Enterprise Evolution by Murat Erder and Pierre Pureur.

The article describes transitional architectures, and introduces the idea of change in architecture avoiding the sometimes difficult direct from current to the "to be" architecture leap.  They propose what they call a prescriptive approach using a series of achievable application plateaus and architecture waves that help to ensure the achievement of business value with each transition  towards the to be architecture, and avoiding being in a constant state of transition. 

Basically, a series of architectural rest stops on the path to the final destination.

In this article, we offer our version of the prescriptive approach:  Why not briefly document the current state of the architecture, define the desired state at the conceptual level,and finally define transitional architectures on the way to reaching that goal? In other words, we introduce the idea of change within the architecture process.By following this approach,you will quickly learn which areas you need to focus on before moving forward with the architecture models and blueprints. Our method also yields several important benefits,including a focus on delivering architecture features that matter most to the business; effective risk mitigation, expectation management, and requirements traceability; and lower costs.

The article is very readable, and may be of interest to developers, designers and business analysts as well.

Werner Vogels interview large scale systems

I admit it, I'm a bit of a Vogels fanboy.  I try not to repost Slashdot postings, but I'll make an exception for this ACM QueueCast interview with Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.  I like his attitude, and I feel he has some credibility since they're one of the first truly successful SOA implementations around, both internally and externally.

They also have the interview in mp3 format. 

The Long Tail

In keeping with the architect's obligation to be informed of business and industry trends, I thought I'd mention the release of Chris Anderson's (Wired's editor-in-chief) book The Long Tail.  According to Boing Boing, it reached #1 on Amazon on it's first day.

Having not yet read the book, I'm reticent to start debate on any aspect, but I will mention that the editorial review from Publisher's Weekly on Amazon's site takes issue with the author's assertion of the long tail being applicable to industries beyond entertainment.  I can assure you that there are certainly implications in the library and information provision sector.  There are arguments (that I don't necessarily believe entirely) that the industry is almost completely about the long tail.  I'm sure many other businesses are similar.

Update (2006-07-12):  In what's sure to be the first of many cognitive overlaps I just discovered that Richard Akerman recently posted on this topic.