I am working on my second enterprise SOA implementation in the last 4 years. The first implementation was at a medium sized IT shop of 200+ people. That project was driven by the need to revamp business processes and leverage SOA to connect new user interfaces driven by workflow to old legacy systems. My current SOA initiative is quite unique. As a startup we are building from a blank sheet of paper. There is no legacy to deal with. ... Read More
SOA Management Strategy
My latest article on SOAInstitute.org titled Management Strategies for SOA was published today. To quickly summarize the article here, it all starts with a well defined roadmap. In my article titled Strategies for developing a Roadmap for your SOA, I defined a roadmap as… A roadmap is a vision of what the future state should look like some point down the road The roadmap should be the basis of your planning and management strategy... Read More
Will the Cloud drive SOA adoption?
I participated in a podcast today on EBizQ with Peter Schooff, managing editor. You can listen to the podcast or simply read the transcript here. To summarize, I believe that companies with a sound architecture that is loosely couple from both their data layer and their infrastructure are in a great position to take advantage of cloud computing. Companies that are tightly coupled or “hard-wired” to their databases and servers... Read More
Cloud Computing: Top 10 Worst Practices
It is no surprise that many IT organizations are struggling to implement enterprise solutions in the cloud. After all, we have seen IT struggle for decades with many “new” initiatives like SOA, ERP implementations, Enterprise Architecture, etc. The following list captures what I call cloud computing worst practices. Many of these items on the list are the same mistakes that IT has been making for decades while others are specific... Read More
Your biggest competitor may not exist yet
Or, your biggest competitor may be a startup that is in stealth mode and you have no idea what they are up to. There are many reasons why you should be worried about new startups if you are a big monolithic company. Startups don’t have the following baggage: Cultural barriers that prevent innovation and new concepts Legacy systems that drain valuable resources (people, infrastructure, and budget) Silos between the business and... Read More
The real problem with Cloud Computing….People
I said the same thing when we were in the extreme hype & FUD stage of SOA. Now we have simply changed the marketing slides from SOA to Cloud Computing and the same pattern of insanity commences. Cloud Insanity – To repeat the same behaviors that caused SOA to fail and expect a different result. For the creators of Cloud Computing FUD, here are some bullets for you to dwell on…. Nothing is secure unless you architect for it. ... Read More
Strategies for developing a Roadmap for your SOA initiative
My quarterly article for the SOAInstitute.org was published today. In this post I mentioned that a lack of focus on architecture and a lack of a well defined roadmap has led to much of the struggles and even failures of enterprise SOA initiatives. Since I have written so much about the architecture side of the equation, my focus in this article was on strategies for SOA roadmaps. I will summarize the article briefly below but please read... Read More
Cloud Insanity – Focusing on all the wrong things, again
I small number of bloggers keep reminding the industry of the lessons learned from SOA. We keep reminding people that to succeed in the cloud there must be a focus on architecture. Well it doesn’t sound like many people are listening. The same patterns of destruction that caused so many SOA failures are apparent once again as organizations look to the cloud as their next savior. Here are the patterns that I am referring to: ... Read More
Top 10 reasons why MDM might be the next dead buzzword
After several days of mourning the death of SOA, one of our closest friends, I see a lot of chatter shifting to MDM (Master Data Management). Like SOA, properly architected MDM provides businesses with flexibility and agility. In addition, it can add a higher level of quality by presenting a cleansed federated view of corporate data so that there is only “one truth” to the questions that are asked by the consumers of data. Like... Read More
Did SOA die or do we just suck at architecture?
Burton Group Analyst Anne Thomas Manes wrote a great article yesterday called SOA is Dead, Long Live Services. If you just read headlines, you might think that she is denouncing SOA as a failed architecture. But if you read the entire article you will find that what Anne is really denouncing is the term SOA and the failed approaches that most organizations have used to try to implement it. Although the word “SOA” is dead, the requirement... Read More
