The Cost of Complexity

September 27, 2007 from CIO Insight – “Is enterprise software just too complex to deliver on its promises?" That's the excellent question posed in an article on the Web site of the MIT Sloan Management Review by consultant Cynthia Rettig. Her answer is a forceful but thoughtful yes. And the upshot is that it's preventing companies from being flexible and IT organizations from being the force for innovation they could and should be.

And Rettig thinks the SOA, like ERP, will fail to solve the problem: The hallmark of SOA is its ability to claim to build modular business processes. However, "software does not work as Legos do," she writes."

180 View – SOA (Service-oriented Architecture) gets a lot of hype. A good chunk of my (Michael Burns) career was in software development, and we called SOA reusable code then. We tried hard to make code reusable but the more generic we made it, the more complicated it became. At a certain point, we gave up and kept it or tried to keep it simple. I have been thinking that perhaps I don’t know enough about the great software tools available today and should be less cynical about SOA. But I am not the only one who is skeptical about SOA.

SOA in Plain Language

August 31, 2006 from Datamation – “Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is big business – and it’s getting even bigger. Heavyweight vendors like IBM and Accenture are promoting it intensely. Forward-looking enterprises are moving to adopt SOA into their business plans.

In the view of SOA’s proponents, Service-Oriented Architecture has the potential to create a revolution in IT departments. It will blur the line between software and service, radically changing the software industry. It will save companies money, greatly increase productivity, and empower network architects to envision brillant new services.

The only thing it can’t do, apparently, is cook an egg in under two minutes. And with time SOA might even develop that capacity.

But amid the growing interest in SOA – and the grand claims about it – plenty of businesses are still wondering: should we get on board? And what exactly is SOA?

Their confusion is understandable. SOA is a buzzword that is defined using buzzwords. The jargon is so deep you need boots to walk through it.

For example, try to decipher this clear-as-mud definition from Wikipedia:

“Service-Oriented Architecture expresses a perspective of software architecture that defines the use of services to support the requirements of software users.”

Huh? Can you put that in English?

Given that SOA vendors are still working to explain this concept to potential clients, a clear, plain language definition is needed. One of the best experts to provide that is Marianne Hedin, an IDC analyst who tracks SOA.

So, Marianne, what is SOA?

“It’s not a technology, and it’s not something you can buy off the shelf,” she tells Datamation. “It’s a paradigm, it’s a shift, it’s an architectural concept. It’s a new way in which you architect your IT environment.”

“But what,” she asks, with a laugh, “does all that mean?”

Good question. So what exactly is SOA?

Interoperability and Integration

SOA’s greatest value is that it allows enormous interoperability between software, information, and processes.

SOA enables a network architect to mix and match existing elements (software, data, or processes) to create custom-made composites to better serve the business’s needs.

Enterprise managers “can create new services for their clients by taking a component from this application and combining it with a component from another application,” Hedin explains. In doing so, “They can create a new type of service, or a new kind of application, that can serve their clients much, much better.”

With SOA, the divisions between proprietary software start to blur. For instance, a network architect can allow users to combine functionality from software by Oracle and Microsoft and Sun all into one composite application. “The name of the game is interoperability,” Hedin says.

The services offered by these various applications become one composite service. Hence the name “Service-Oriented Architecture.”

(IDC will host a forum in September demonstrating that SOA allows interoperability between .NET, BEA’s Web Logic, and Sun’s Java.)

SOA’s ability to combine disparate elements also applies to legacy software and data. So, for example, SOA can help an insurance company more easily tap data that’s stored in outdated 1980s-vintage software.

In fact, SOA enables companies to avoid constant software upgrades, as well as that once-a-decade software overhaul, by allowing employees to more effectively work with legacy applications.

“The architecture allows you to do a lot of integration of disparate systems, regardless of the age,” Hedin says.

Related to (But Separate from) Web Services

Say a Web site wants to sell airfares from many airlines. The site allows users to book a hotel room, rent a car, and buy concert tickets in the destination city.

“In order to be able to provide that kind of service to the client, that Web site had to be able to integrate multiple applications together, and many pieces of information from disparate systems,” Hedin says. “They have all kinds of technology they want to take advantage of there.”

With SOA “Even if the [the data streams and software] are all different, different codes, etc, they can all talk to each other. They can be combined and integrated.”

(Note: This functionality can be combined without SOA, but it’s much easier to combine disparate data and applications using SOA.)

The standards that have been adopted for Web services, like SOAP and REST, enhance and expand SOA’s capability.

However, “You can have an SOA architecture without Web services,” she notes. “But with Web services you can leverage SOA much more effectively because you have the interfaces that help you with the integration.”

In sum, SOA really does create something of a revolution in the data center. SOA turns a network comprised of discrete elements – purchased over several years, held together by rubber bands and band-aids – into a refreshed and ever-flexible source of business solutions.”

180 View – If you still don’t understand SOA, you’re SOL.

Is there real business value behind the hype of SOA?

June 19, 2006 from ComputerWorld - "The No. 1 business priority for CIOs in 2006 is business process improvement 1 -- implementing technology to help the business become more streamlined and easier to do business with. The good news is that IT executives realize that collaborating with business leaders to drive business process improvements is vital to company success; the bad news is that even though business/IT alignment has been a top priority for the past eight years and IT organizations are transforming, the issue of business/IT alignment remains.

Now comes service-oriented architecture (SOA) with promises to change the way that IT helps drive business process improvements and even how IT and business work together. The idea behind SOA is that a services-centric application and IT infrastructure can be assembled flexibly to support changing business demands, growth and innovation. But is SOA just another vendor initiative to sell more hardware, software and services, or is it truly an industry-changing construct? In other words, is there real business value behind the hype?

SOA is being sold as a flexible way to configure all IT assets, both current and future, so that each is available as a service. SOA is supposed to provide the foundation for rapid, dynamic adaptation to changing business conditions.

The ills SOA is meant to cure are well known. Application and infrastructure investments have created islands, with applications developed to support a specific business function or need -- a payroll application, say, or an order-entry application. The IT group works with the business to identify a specific business process need, then procures, develops or customizes software to solve the problem. It deploys the software on dedicated server and storage hardware. Later, when the business realizes that these islands need to communicate and interact with one another, large integration projects are undertaken. And when the applications are modified, vendor enhancements, upgrades and support are all in jeopardy. In the end, much of the dedicated capital investment in hardware and purchased software has been underutilized, highly customized and inflexible to change.

With SOA, the organization begins by trying to better understand business processes, mapping out various process steps and then devising Web service-enabled applications and integrations in support of these steps. Process improvement has its roots in the Total Quality Management movement in the late '80s, but the goal of process automation wasn't possible until the Internet became part of a global network that can provide a foundation for program-to-program communication and standards-based information exchange. Today, Web service enablement allows for application components to deliver data and processing to other applications. And as the library of service-enabled applications grows, each service can be reused to optimize other business processes…

The coverage SOA has received recently may make it seem like pure hype. However, the benefits are tangible and substantial. Those who have taken even minor steps on the road to implementing SOA are reaping immediate IT cost reductions and incremental business benefits. Those that have gone farther down the road, embracing enterprisewide implementation of service-oriented applications and a service-oriented, virtualized infrastructure, are finding that they have made a fundamental change in the way IT and the business invest in technology and work together."

180 View - The article gives an example of Visa with "savings said to total $52 million a year in direct operating costs and $300 million in ancillary savings" using SOA. Unfortunately it's so easy to find numbers that support a business case especially when the numbers come from the people responsible for the project. In the VISA example, a paper based system was replaced. Perhaps, the savngs would have been even more with a different technology.