Long term Red Room blogger Saul Cunningham along with the newbies Richard Ward and myself from the ANZ team will be looking into how SOA projects should be better run and governed to ensure they deliver their full potential back to the business over the next little while... But what a time to begin such a series of posts, amid the extensive 'SOA is dead' debate that someone described as being to the blogoshere what "Sarah Palin was to late night comedy TV!"
The king may well be dead but SOA isn't, and it's not working down the chipshop either. There is a single indestructible truth at the heart of SOA that will keep it alive and that is this; it makes sense to build something once and reuse it. This is a staggeringly good idea and it's not going away any time soon. It's just a tough sell to convince an industry that has grown up on building new stuff every time a new requirement comes along that there is another way to go.
This is not a new argument. I started work as a COBOL programmer in nineteen eighty something or other and one of the first things I learned was that my development shop had a library of pre-built services - only we didn't call them services back then, they were sub-routines or includes if I remember rightly - that you could use as a programmer to do repeatable utility tasks, date conversion for example. These were battle hardened bits of software that you gave certain inputs too and would deliver you a result. Black boxes that did exactly what they said on the tin . Sub-routines, includes, components, services, call them what you will, reusing something that has been built already delivers speed, flexibility, reliability and is cost effective.
Other industries know this. The highly unfashionable car industry for example knows that building a component once and plugging it in to a shared platform is an idea that works. The Volkswagen Beetle and Audi TT are different cars aimed at very different drivers (different applications aimed at different end users to use the language of the software industry) but are built around a common architecture and share common components. Just look at how many applications the VW group have actually built on the A4 platform.
Slightly more fashionable than any company in the traditional car industry today - no Tesla, that doesn't include you - is Apple. Does Apple understand that building a component once and reusing it in many devices is a good idea? Too right it does. The hardware side of the IT industry has figured it out too, take a bow Dell, Asus, Lenovo - or any other laptop maker you care to mention. Why has proven to be such an un-natural act for the software side of the industry when it's a no-brainer to anyone on the outside looking in?
And then there's the old chestnut about business value and aligning IT with the business. Why are we still having this conversation? I saw this perfectly summed up by David Foster, responding to a post on Nick Carr’s blog via Joe McKendrick at ZDNet. On a seminar entitled Aligning IT with the Business; "Isn’t it a bit strange that there is still a need for this kind of thing? There have been IT organizations in American business for fifty years now. No one sends out seminar invitations for ‘aligning manufacturing with the business’ or ‘aligning sales with the
business’ or ‘aligning logistics with the business.’ Clearly, there are a lot of businesspeople who believe that IT marches to a drummer other than the best overall interests of the corporation."
SOA, alive and kicking, fixes that. The fundamentals of SOA are business fundamentals not technology. One of the favourite phrases of Paul Coby, CIO of British Airways is, "There are no IT projects. Only business projects". And he's right. If you're working in IT and can't see how what you are doing on a daily basis links to the goals of your organsiation then something is wrong. IT exists to support the aims of the organisation, to serve customers better - quicker, faster, cheaper - and SOA is the best way that we in IT have yet come up with to represent what we can offer to our organisations as a set of reusable reliable components. SOA isn't dead, it's in rude health.
-Sean
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Thursday, January 8, 2009
SOA is Dead, Long Live ECM?
So, you've probably read the posts from a bunch of people lamenting the passing of SOA to the next world. The thing is, SOA is a fantastic technology that provides so many benefits and capabilities to the modern organisation that it shouldn't be allowed to die without so much as a lowering of the corporate flag or the echoing sounds of a muted trumpet!
Now, most of you know I'm the Blog's content expert - so you're probably asking yourself what does SOA have to do with me.....? The thing is, you see, SOA is really, really important for ECM from the integration and goverance perspective. If I had a dollar for each time I've been told 'ECM is really difficult to implement and enforce' I would have $12 (probably). ECM can be hard to deploy and get user buy-in simply because it adds a layer of complexity to the user and we all know, users' really don't like change. But, what if leveraging an ECM solution was simplified - what if adding, changing or deletion content was easy and looked/felt/smelt no different to the tools being used by the workforce today? This is probably the easiest example of how SOA and ECM can work effectively to enable the deployment of an unstructured content solution for the enterprise.
SOA, by definition, allows services to be built in a manner that promotes reuse. They also help simplify the process for interacting with a solution - like ECM. Most people in the industry understand basic SQL - SELECT, INSERT, MODIFY and DELETE are standard functions that allow the interaction between an application and records within a relational database. But when it comes to unstructured content that is managed within an ECM solution - there are a lot more features and functions that could be called, i.e. security, version-management, rendition-management etc. The API calls required within an ECM solution go beyond the 4 basic concepts that SQL provides and this is where the power of SOA comes into play - allowing the combination of complex API calls within a simplified service layer where an application 'simply' requests that a document be stored or retrieved from the repository. Where an organisation creates (or buys) a library of ECM-related service calls - the integration of the ECM repository to a large number of difference applications (or uses) becomes more straight-forward and allows the 3rd generation ECM model of an Information Infrastructure to be truly deployed. SOA makes this, and other types of integrations, much easier to implement - maybe it is time for a rebranding of what is one of the most useful tools in the IT kitbag - SOA certainly hasn't died!
Paul
Now, most of you know I'm the Blog's content expert - so you're probably asking yourself what does SOA have to do with me.....? The thing is, you see, SOA is really, really important for ECM from the integration and goverance perspective. If I had a dollar for each time I've been told 'ECM is really difficult to implement and enforce' I would have $12 (probably). ECM can be hard to deploy and get user buy-in simply because it adds a layer of complexity to the user and we all know, users' really don't like change. But, what if leveraging an ECM solution was simplified - what if adding, changing or deletion content was easy and looked/felt/smelt no different to the tools being used by the workforce today? This is probably the easiest example of how SOA and ECM can work effectively to enable the deployment of an unstructured content solution for the enterprise.
SOA, by definition, allows services to be built in a manner that promotes reuse. They also help simplify the process for interacting with a solution - like ECM. Most people in the industry understand basic SQL - SELECT, INSERT, MODIFY and DELETE are standard functions that allow the interaction between an application and records within a relational database. But when it comes to unstructured content that is managed within an ECM solution - there are a lot more features and functions that could be called, i.e. security, version-management, rendition-management etc. The API calls required within an ECM solution go beyond the 4 basic concepts that SQL provides and this is where the power of SOA comes into play - allowing the combination of complex API calls within a simplified service layer where an application 'simply' requests that a document be stored or retrieved from the repository. Where an organisation creates (or buys) a library of ECM-related service calls - the integration of the ECM repository to a large number of difference applications (or uses) becomes more straight-forward and allows the 3rd generation ECM model of an Information Infrastructure to be truly deployed. SOA makes this, and other types of integrations, much easier to implement - maybe it is time for a rebranding of what is one of the most useful tools in the IT kitbag - SOA certainly hasn't died!
Paul
SOA is just fine…thank you
"The rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated" Mark Twain
So…SOA is dead. Apparently it died on the 1st of January 2009, so said Anne in her Burton Blog. With the recession, SOA budgets are being slashed; countless failures abound, with the odd success peaking above the sea of despair. The doom and gloom prophets are all saying, “we told you so”. So we turn our heads to some new saviour, the SOA offspring of mashups, SAAS and clouds.
The wrong approach
So why is there so much disillusionment? Probably because a lot of people just did not get it and the approaches they took were wrong. The recession has been a great opportunity for business to bullet wayward IT strategies that were not aligned to their business. So it is not a bad thing really. In my books, it is a good reality check. On the other hand SOA is old news, and our industry is often guilty of needing something new to talk about. But lets not go and run off to something new, when all it takes is understanding what we have today.
Getting back to basics
There is nothing wrong with SOA; in fact the intention of SOA to support transformation of organisations is pretty profound, but probably overwhelming for some. I agree with Anne when she said that SOA needs to be part of something bigger, such as organisational transformation. I have seen too many instances where organisations think that they are doing SOA, but all they are doing are technology projects focusing on aspects such as service-based integration, resulting often in poor ROI, no service reusability, and achieving no business alignment.
We have been afforded the opportunity, through many years of SOA experience, to reflect on what is required and what to avoid. Anne highlighted 10 reasons why SOA fails ranging from a lack of business alignment and case, through to skills and governance. Her arguments are sound and should be read by everyone who is interested in understanding what issues you need to address. David Linthicum in his five things articles talked about bigger issues at play, such as misrepresentation by vendors, and the requirement of strong leadership. While we can’t change some of things he spoke about, it is still good to be aware of what to watch out for.
Will SOA evolve, yes it will. That is a definite. But even with new approaches, we will still have to have the ground rules in place. There is no quick fix or magical elixir.
In the coming weeks the Red Room Team will discuss some key issues that need to be addressed if SOA-assisted transformation is to be successful.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Your Web Presence in 2009
Hi All
There's lots of talk around the Global Financial Crisis and the impact it is going to have on businesses around the world this year. To remain successful, your business must acknowledge its web-presence and the importance it serves to your audience - your customers and partners. Knowing who your audience is and what they are interested in reading will help you publish the right content, keeping interest in your organisation and your products and maintain and grow sales. An interactive site, driven using Web2.0 technologies will go a long way to achieving this, allowing customers and partners to provide you feedback - that you hopefully take on-board rather than ignore - will help you remain relevant to your marketplace. But, equally as important is the content that you publish itself - this is what drives people to keep coming back to your site (assuming you don't just sell widgets online that-it!).
Your web-presence is your online marketing platform. Tell your audience regularly what you are doing, which direction you are taking and what you hope to achieve. Invest in getting your content right - not just on cool technologies within the website that actually provide little value - high-quality, informative and relevant. Your content should be targetted towards your audience and its effectiveness measured. Look to experiment, don't be afraid of failure and try to avoid over-personalised content where possible.
Happy online marketing
Paul
There's lots of talk around the Global Financial Crisis and the impact it is going to have on businesses around the world this year. To remain successful, your business must acknowledge its web-presence and the importance it serves to your audience - your customers and partners. Knowing who your audience is and what they are interested in reading will help you publish the right content, keeping interest in your organisation and your products and maintain and grow sales. An interactive site, driven using Web2.0 technologies will go a long way to achieving this, allowing customers and partners to provide you feedback - that you hopefully take on-board rather than ignore - will help you remain relevant to your marketplace. But, equally as important is the content that you publish itself - this is what drives people to keep coming back to your site (assuming you don't just sell widgets online that-it!).
Your web-presence is your online marketing platform. Tell your audience regularly what you are doing, which direction you are taking and what you hope to achieve. Invest in getting your content right - not just on cool technologies within the website that actually provide little value - high-quality, informative and relevant. Your content should be targetted towards your audience and its effectiveness measured. Look to experiment, don't be afraid of failure and try to avoid over-personalised content where possible.
Happy online marketing
Paul
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Happy New Year and Here's to 2009
Happy New Year to all our readers around the world from the team here in Australia.
First of all, I would like to take this opportunity to update you on our contributors here at Oracle. We would like to thank Barry Matthews and Steve Williamson for their contributions during 2008. Barry and Steve have moved to different roles within the organisation. We do welcome 3 new regular contributors to the Blog though, may I introduce to you...
Sean Boiling - who joins us from the Oracle Sales Consulting team. Sean has been contributing to the Blog for some time now and now becomes a regular contributor. Sean's interests lie in Fusion Middleware covering SOA, Enterprise 2.0, BPM, and the BEA-products we acquired during 2008.
Richard Ward - who joined Oracle Asia-Pacific in November 2008. Prior to this, Richard spent time with Oracle South-Africa - his homeland - and with one of our partners here in Sydney. Richard will focus on SOA with Saul Cunningham.
Marc Caltabiano - who is Oracle's Director of Enterprise Architecture for Australia and New Zealand, based in Melbourne.
Sean, Richard and Marc will be posting to the Red Room and join Carl, Saul and myself as regular contributors for 2009. Gareth Llewellyn, our roving-reporter in waiting, will continue to contribute on a specialist basis as he did during 2008 for the Oracle OpenWorld.
We aim to deliver more content, more regularly during 2009. We reach our 1-year anniversary in February and look forward to celebrating (virtually) with you all at that time. We have some special features coming up this year - starting with a 10-part series around SOA Governance that we know so many people are interested in (from the feedback you give us). We will continue with the Enterprise 2.0 product stack - talkling about our portal offerings and giving some real-world examples of where we have deployed the products for our customers and discussing some of the benefits that have been gained. IDM and Enterprise Architecture will also get some significant coverage this year - driven by some of the current business-challenges faced by organisations trying to support Web2.0 initiatives for example.
Here at the blog, we think that 2009 is going to be an incredibly interesting year around the world considering the current economic environment and the changing drivers for businesses as a whole. There will be a lot of consolidation, merging and acquisition during 2009 and beyond as organisations are challenged to respond to changing conditions and external pressures. This activity will affect our customers, our partners and our competition - the global marketplace for our technologies, products and solutions will change - our challenge is to prepare for this and be in the best position possible when it happens.
The greatest possible challenge for organisations is going to be adapting a business model to the Web2.0 way of doing business. During 2008, it was reported on several occasions that successful businesses were addressing end-user requirements through a collaborative approach. Rather than trying to second-guess what might be popular - these organisations actually listed to what their customers ask for and address these needs. This is based upon the simple principal that if you are selling something that somebody wants at the right price - they will probably buy it!
A Web2.0 approach introduces challenges for an organisation. There is structured and unstructured information to be managed, CRM and ERP systems to be intergrated with, Portals to be deployed and mass-security to manage. Ever-increasing storage requirements need to be met and the IT department is challenged with Green issues. Organisations want a complete solution from a single vendor, it has to be able to be integrated into any legacy system or application and must support an open standards approach to enable ease of development and supportability.
During 2009, we will concentrate on how organisations address these requirements and talk in-depth around Oracle's products and solutions in a non-sales manner. We realise that many of our readers want to learn about our offerings and this approach should provide some context for you all. Of course, if you want us to concentrate on something else - let us know and we welcome any feedback on the blog you want to give us.
We wish you a prosperous New Year
Paul, Carl, Saul, Richard, Gareth, Sean, Marc.
First of all, I would like to take this opportunity to update you on our contributors here at Oracle. We would like to thank Barry Matthews and Steve Williamson for their contributions during 2008. Barry and Steve have moved to different roles within the organisation. We do welcome 3 new regular contributors to the Blog though, may I introduce to you...
Sean Boiling - who joins us from the Oracle Sales Consulting team. Sean has been contributing to the Blog for some time now and now becomes a regular contributor. Sean's interests lie in Fusion Middleware covering SOA, Enterprise 2.0, BPM, and the BEA-products we acquired during 2008.
Richard Ward - who joined Oracle Asia-Pacific in November 2008. Prior to this, Richard spent time with Oracle South-Africa - his homeland - and with one of our partners here in Sydney. Richard will focus on SOA with Saul Cunningham.
Marc Caltabiano - who is Oracle's Director of Enterprise Architecture for Australia and New Zealand, based in Melbourne.
Sean, Richard and Marc will be posting to the Red Room and join Carl, Saul and myself as regular contributors for 2009. Gareth Llewellyn, our roving-reporter in waiting, will continue to contribute on a specialist basis as he did during 2008 for the Oracle OpenWorld.
We aim to deliver more content, more regularly during 2009. We reach our 1-year anniversary in February and look forward to celebrating (virtually) with you all at that time. We have some special features coming up this year - starting with a 10-part series around SOA Governance that we know so many people are interested in (from the feedback you give us). We will continue with the Enterprise 2.0 product stack - talkling about our portal offerings and giving some real-world examples of where we have deployed the products for our customers and discussing some of the benefits that have been gained. IDM and Enterprise Architecture will also get some significant coverage this year - driven by some of the current business-challenges faced by organisations trying to support Web2.0 initiatives for example.
Here at the blog, we think that 2009 is going to be an incredibly interesting year around the world considering the current economic environment and the changing drivers for businesses as a whole. There will be a lot of consolidation, merging and acquisition during 2009 and beyond as organisations are challenged to respond to changing conditions and external pressures. This activity will affect our customers, our partners and our competition - the global marketplace for our technologies, products and solutions will change - our challenge is to prepare for this and be in the best position possible when it happens.
The greatest possible challenge for organisations is going to be adapting a business model to the Web2.0 way of doing business. During 2008, it was reported on several occasions that successful businesses were addressing end-user requirements through a collaborative approach. Rather than trying to second-guess what might be popular - these organisations actually listed to what their customers ask for and address these needs. This is based upon the simple principal that if you are selling something that somebody wants at the right price - they will probably buy it!
A Web2.0 approach introduces challenges for an organisation. There is structured and unstructured information to be managed, CRM and ERP systems to be intergrated with, Portals to be deployed and mass-security to manage. Ever-increasing storage requirements need to be met and the IT department is challenged with Green issues. Organisations want a complete solution from a single vendor, it has to be able to be integrated into any legacy system or application and must support an open standards approach to enable ease of development and supportability.
During 2009, we will concentrate on how organisations address these requirements and talk in-depth around Oracle's products and solutions in a non-sales manner. We realise that many of our readers want to learn about our offerings and this approach should provide some context for you all. Of course, if you want us to concentrate on something else - let us know and we welcome any feedback on the blog you want to give us.
We wish you a prosperous New Year
Paul, Carl, Saul, Richard, Gareth, Sean, Marc.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
the red room review for 2008
The red room was founded for several reasons, to communicate with Oracle customers and the general IT community was one. But to make this communication more interesting we wanted to explore how new WEB 2.0 technologies could assist. Could these largely social utilities add any value for Oracle, our readership and our customers?
The answer is a resounding yes. Technologies that worked very well included Twitter with live feeds from Oracle Open World OOW08, Linkedin to participate in group discussions around areas like security and compliance, and the content hosting sites like iTunes, Podbean and Scribd.
Sure these sites would enrich the experience on the red room for our readers. The real bonus is that each of these technologies has their own unique communities to tap into. For example the red room had over 5,000 visits from July this year, scribd which hosts our presentations had over 2,500 views from scribd users. So you see we reached potentially another 2,500 readers by placing the content in multiple sites and 632 people downloaded a podcasts from podbean.
Our readership includes 50% from Australia and New Zealand which validates that people are interested in reading localised content and not just from news from the USA. Other countries include France, Turkey, Japan, Italy and Spain (i need a field trip) with 74 countries in all.
The Oracle news highlights for me this year included the acquisition of BEA and Oracles first hardware appliance The Database Machine.
Our top 5 articles this year
1. SOA or Not
2. Unstructured Information Management
3. Australian Federal Government and WEB2.0
Other notable articles include
· Open World Final Day and the Joy of X
· Oracle and BEA – Full Circle
· iPhone and its impact on Information Management
In 2009 we will have more contributors including a 10 posts series on SOA Governance. Look our for our new years eve posts from Paul Ricketts for more on this and what the future will hold for the red room in 2009.
Its time i bid you farewell, presents to wrap and no doubt a cold beer also. Have a joyous holiday with your friends and family, try and avoid the news so you can rest and recharge for what will be an interesting 2009.
Cheers
Carl
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
FaceBook Used to Serve Legal Documents
This is probably a world first! Lawyers in Australia have used FaceBook to serve legal documents to two defendants through their FaceBook Pages according to livenews.com.au. The ACT Supreme Court authorised the legal firm to use the FaceBook system once it was satisfied that it presented a 'sufficient method of communication'. Lawyers from the legal firm, Meyer Vandenberg, came across the idea themselves after investigating alternative methods of contacting individuals. They researched FaceBook and found the two defendants pages and established through their system of 'friends' that they were acquainted. Notice was then served on the two defendants through their FaceBook pages.This follows recent and well publicised activites around FaceBook - one event occured when a group of restaurant patrons left without paying. Thanks to one of the waiting staff who recognised one of the patrons - FaceBook was used to track down the group, their employers identified and contacted and the bill settled in full with a large tip left.
The world is getting smaller and there are fewer places to hids
Paul
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