Yesterday I was reminded of an article I had passed on to my team members months ago and subsequently forgot. Its on msdn and is titled “A Comparison of the Top Four Enterprise Architecture Methodologies” and was written by Roger Sessions. Sessions is the CTO of ObjectWatch Inc. and author of six books and dozens of articles and white papers. He serves on the Board of Directors of the International Association of Software Architects (www.iasahome.org).
Sessions takes the reader through the history of Enterprise Architecture and compares The Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architectures, The Open Group Architectural Framework (TOGAF), The Federal Enterprise Architecture and The Gartner Methodology. The article is easy to read through and uses a understandable and simple case to examplify the points. Sessions main conclusion being that none of the presented Enterprise Architecture methodologies is really complete. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. And most important - as Sessions also points out - the organization cannot succeed using any of them without commitment from the highest level of the organization. That is very much in line with my experience! Sessions offers a comparison of the methodologies and recommend using the best parts from each of them in the areas, where the organization has the most urgent needs. Here are some of Sessions points:
“Zachman tells you how to categorize your artifacts. TOGAF gives you a process for creating them.”
“TOGAF merely describes how to generate an enterprise architecture, not necessarily how to generate a good enterprise architecture.”
“FEA is the most complete of all the methodologies discussed so far. It has both a comprehensive taxonomy, like Zachman, and an architectural process, like TOGAF. FEA can be viewed as either a methodology for creating an enterprise architecture or the result of applying that process to a particular enterprise—namely, the U.S. Government.”
“The best summation of the Gartner practice that I have heard is the following: Architecture is a verb, not a noun.”
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Thursday, October 4, 2007
so much to do
I have been quiet because my head has been buried in a proposal. The Federal Government decided to give us only two weeks to respond to its RFP which we have been chasing for two years. We did a lot of work in advance but unfortunately its contents did not match the RFP and pretty much everything had to be thrown out. Then I made a short trip to see my mom in beautiful Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.
I have so many conferences and training coming up.
Next week I will be attending a free 2-day training session on the Methodology for Business Transformation (MBT) approach employed by the Department of Interior (DOI) Enterprise Architecture (EA) program. Northrop Grumman has been the lead contractor on this program, which created the MBT, based on the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA). The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and General Accounting Office (GAO) have consistently ranked this program as having the highest of all ratings among all Federal Enterprise Architecture programs.
At the end of this month (October) I fly to Orlando for 4 days for PegaWorld 2007. Then next month I go to San Francisco for Oracle Open World 2007 where I will get to listen to people such as Michael Dell and Larry Ellison speak. I am not a groupie but it should be interesting what these guys have to say. I have never heard either of them speak live although I did listen to an audio version of Michael Dell's book seven years ago.
I get back on November 16, just in time to fly on the 17th to Europe for 2 weeks. ;-D
And between now and the first of March I have to attend three courses I have already paid for at the Learning Tree. I bought a training passport, not really realizing how difficult it was going to be to find time to attend four different training classes. I have had to schedule and reschedule and reschedule and reschedule again. In March it expires so I no longer have room to negotiate.
I cannot wait to get to Europe. ;-D
I have so many conferences and training coming up.
Next week I will be attending a free 2-day training session on the Methodology for Business Transformation (MBT) approach employed by the Department of Interior (DOI) Enterprise Architecture (EA) program. Northrop Grumman has been the lead contractor on this program, which created the MBT, based on the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA). The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and General Accounting Office (GAO) have consistently ranked this program as having the highest of all ratings among all Federal Enterprise Architecture programs.
At the end of this month (October) I fly to Orlando for 4 days for PegaWorld 2007. Then next month I go to San Francisco for Oracle Open World 2007 where I will get to listen to people such as Michael Dell and Larry Ellison speak. I am not a groupie but it should be interesting what these guys have to say. I have never heard either of them speak live although I did listen to an audio version of Michael Dell's book seven years ago.
I get back on November 16, just in time to fly on the 17th to Europe for 2 weeks. ;-D
And between now and the first of March I have to attend three courses I have already paid for at the Learning Tree. I bought a training passport, not really realizing how difficult it was going to be to find time to attend four different training classes. I have had to schedule and reschedule and reschedule and reschedule again. In March it expires so I no longer have room to negotiate.
I cannot wait to get to Europe. ;-D
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
on perseverance
I am feeling tired... This past weekend was Labor Day -- a 3 or 4 day holiday for most folks... I was supposed to go visit my mother. But we are sitting waiting for the federal govt to release an RFP and we expect to be given only about a week since the govt has to award the contract THIS MONTH due to their fiscal budget. So I worked all 3 days... And today is Wednesday and still no RFP. :-( Anyway, we have been having lively discussions about Enterprise Architecture and Service Oriented Architecture and their boundaries -- talking about such things as it is wise to plan a large SOA project without considering EA? (no of course its not wise but how much do you need to elaborate?) And is it practical to adopt a SOA methodology that requires you to consider (or lay the groundwork for) EA (no its not...there are many projects out there which are candidates for SOA but the organization doesn't want to hear anything about EA) and how much groundwork is enough and how much is too much? Anyway, one of the folks involved in this discussion sent out the following quote (he was angry because he felt unfairly criticized -- he was and he also took it too seriously--sometimes its best to just let things roll off your shoulder).
"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."
"Citizenship in a Republic,"
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910
"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."
"Citizenship in a Republic,"
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
interesting article on wikipedia
I have been busy doing some major off-line writing but wanted to share an article that I thought was kind of interesting..
CIA, FBI computers used for Wikipedia edits
Randall Mikkelsen
August 17, 2007 (Reuters) People using CIA and FBI computers have edited entries in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia on topics including the Iraq war and the Guantanamo prison, according to a new tracing program.
The changes may violate Wikipedia's conflict-of-interest guidelines, a spokeswoman for the site said on Thursday.
The program, WikiScanner, was developed by Virgil Griffith of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and posted this month on a Web site that was quickly overwhelmed with searches.
The program allows users to track the source of computers used to make changes to the popular Internet encyclopedia where anyone can submit and edit entries.
WikiScanner revealed that CIA computers were used to edit an entry on the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. A graphic on casualties was edited to add that many figures were estimated and were not broken down by class.
Another entry on former CIA chief William Colby was edited by CIA computers to expand his career history and discuss the merits of a Vietnam War rural pacification program that he headed.
Aerial and satellite images of the U.S. prison for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were removed using a computer traced to the FBI, WikiScanner showed.
CIA spokesman George Little said he could not confirm whether CIA computers were used in the changes, adding that "the agency always expects its computer systems to be used responsibly."
The FBI did not have an immediate response.
Computers at numerous other organizations and companies were found to have been involved in editing articles related to them.
Griffith said he developed WikiScanner "to create minor public relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike (and) to see what 'interesting organizations' (which I am neutral towards) are up to."
It was not known whether changes were made by an official representative of an agency or company, Griffith said, but it was certain the change was made by someone with access to the organization's network.
It violates Wikipedia's neutrality guidelines for a person with close ties to an issue to contribute to an entry about it, said spokeswoman Sandy Ordonez of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia's parent organization.
However, she said, "Wikipedia is self-correcting," meaning misleading entries can be quickly revised by another editor. She said Wikimedia welcomed the WikiScanner.
CIA, FBI computers used for Wikipedia edits
Randall Mikkelsen
August 17, 2007 (Reuters) People using CIA and FBI computers have edited entries in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia on topics including the Iraq war and the Guantanamo prison, according to a new tracing program.
The changes may violate Wikipedia's conflict-of-interest guidelines, a spokeswoman for the site said on Thursday.
The program, WikiScanner, was developed by Virgil Griffith of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and posted this month on a Web site that was quickly overwhelmed with searches.
The program allows users to track the source of computers used to make changes to the popular Internet encyclopedia where anyone can submit and edit entries.
WikiScanner revealed that CIA computers were used to edit an entry on the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. A graphic on casualties was edited to add that many figures were estimated and were not broken down by class.
Another entry on former CIA chief William Colby was edited by CIA computers to expand his career history and discuss the merits of a Vietnam War rural pacification program that he headed.
Aerial and satellite images of the U.S. prison for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were removed using a computer traced to the FBI, WikiScanner showed.
CIA spokesman George Little said he could not confirm whether CIA computers were used in the changes, adding that "the agency always expects its computer systems to be used responsibly."
The FBI did not have an immediate response.
Computers at numerous other organizations and companies were found to have been involved in editing articles related to them.
Griffith said he developed WikiScanner "to create minor public relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike (and) to see what 'interesting organizations' (which I am neutral towards) are up to."
It was not known whether changes were made by an official representative of an agency or company, Griffith said, but it was certain the change was made by someone with access to the organization's network.
It violates Wikipedia's neutrality guidelines for a person with close ties to an issue to contribute to an entry about it, said spokeswoman Sandy Ordonez of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia's parent organization.
However, she said, "Wikipedia is self-correcting," meaning misleading entries can be quickly revised by another editor. She said Wikimedia welcomed the WikiScanner.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
trip report describing two recent Gartner conferences
From June 10 to June 15, I attended two consecutive Gartner conferences in Nashville. In the paragraphs that follow I attempt to share some of my observances in the areas of (a) application architecture, development and integration, and (b) enterprise architecture.
The contents below can be grouped into the following topics:
• General overview
• Web Oriented Architecture
• Web 2.0
• Web 3.0 and Web 4.0
• Random Observations
• Some SOA Best Practices
• Websites worthy of review
• Various statistics relevant to IT
General overview
The conference was interesting, not least of which Gartner predicts that SOA is already becoming legacy and among many other topics there is a new buzzword (since 2006, I believe) which is WOA (Web Oriented Architecture). One thing I did get some clarity on is that there is no such thing as a SOA architect! This may be obvious to you, the reader, but in the past year I have repeatedly heard this label used almost as a job position. SOA is simply a design pattern! The correct terminology is to speak of a solutions architect who employs among other design patterns, the SOA design pattern. ESB is also simply a design pattern. There was some discussion that ESBs may impede progress within the SOA strategy and it was forecasted that the ESB may even start to become obsolete within the next two years. Speaking of obsolescence, some analysts are actually even starting to consider AJAX as already becoming obsolete (although it will still be THE major technology for rich internet applications for the next couple of years). I was alerted to the importance in learning TOGAF in addition to FEA and DODAF.
Web Oriented Architecture
Web-oriented architecture (WOA) is based on the principles of REST. Representational state transfer (REST) is the style of the Web, and its principles should be followed for any SOA project.
What is the architecture of the Web, and how is it different from SOA? Although there are many formal definitions of SOA, the market is coalescing around a practical meaning for the term, which includes the following: SOA is about applications; while service orientation is a concept that can be applied to many things (storage area network is a service-oriented approach to storage), which does not make it SOA. SOA is about how one designs applications as the providers and consumers of a set of defined, agreed-upon interfaces (services). In this way, services are a unit of modularity in the same way that subroutines, objects and components are units of modularity. Modularity is how we have improved the ability of programs and our ability to create more complex and integrated software. A key concept in the current modularity that SOA provides is that it incorporates encapsulation. In other words, the service interface is the only means of accessing anything about that service or the information it manages. A key attribute of these new modules is that they are shared, not reused. This means that the definitions that constrain their operation are shared as well. Another thing that is critical to the value of SOA is the fact that the only thing these modules must have in common is the network. That network — a Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) network or its logical equivalent — is the only means of access. This removes any dependency on development time components. The definition of a service is not its WSDL or its implementation code, but how it is manifested over the wire, which eliminates any technological dependency on anything except the application wire protocol. The final assumption is that modules are mostly the same as a subroutine or other structured code component. Thus, some say that current SOA initiatives follow a different architectural pattern than the Web and, therefore, cannot be expected to deliver some of the benefits that are inherent in the Web-oriented pattern.
The only real difference between traditional SOA and the concept of WOA is that WOA advocates REST, an increasingly popular, powerful, and simple method of leveraging HTTP as a Web service in its own right (and carefully devised by the co-creator of HTTP, Roy Fielding.)
WOA itself is a reflection of the classic Reach vs. Rich argument, in that richness is an outcome of robustness and complexity but cuts down how much reach you have to others, particularly in heterogeneous communities. Some say that the modern SOA technologies and architectures have become a near-morass of complex standards, protocols, and products, and that the result is that the present list of WS-* standards is nearly incomprehensible.
This is making some people fall back to simpler and more straightforward methods that work, while hiding the protocol complexity in the application state. Some say that one doesn’t usually need anything more complex than XML and HTTP, one of the most scalable, proven, and widespread protocols on the planet, along with HTTP’s verbs: GET, POST, PUT, DELETE.
REST does not handle enterprise issues like two-phase commit, messaging, and asynchronicity. WOA is definitely not the hammer for every job. Certain applications, particularly in the high-end of the enterprise, require the more sophisticated portions of the SOA stack (don’t forget, WOA is a subset of SOA and is not disjoint as long as you follow the principles of service orientation). However, for many uses, WOA is the most interoperable, easiest to implement, and most highly scalable technique for building open web services.
Web 2.0
Much of the conference was centered on Web 2.0. One of the languages used in AJAX web application programming is "JavaScript Object Notation" (JSON) which is pronounced like the English name Jason. JSON is based on a subset of the JavaScript Programming Language. JSON is a fast, compact representational format that has advantages when used with JavaScript (as is found in browsers). XML, when used with browsers, must be parsed and processed by JavaScript while JSON is simply "consumed" directly. This lightweight data-interchange format is easy for humans to read and write, and easy for machines to parse and generate. JSON is a text format that is completely language independent but uses conventions familiar to programmers of the C-family of languages, including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python, and many others. These properties make JSON an ideal data-interchange language. It provides a simple alternative to XML for asynchronously transmitting structured information between a client and its server. In December 2005, Yahoo! began offering some of its Web Services optionally in JSON. Google started offering JSON feeds for its GData web protocol in December 2006.
Web 3.0 and Web 4.0
Have you ever wondered what the Internet will look like in the future? Most people have heard of some aspect of what has been called web 2.0. You know things like social networking, lightweight programming, web as a platform, and collective intelligence. Most people recognize these by their street names Facebook, AJAX, Google Maps, and wikipedia respectively.
Many people refer to Web 3.0 as the semantic web. The semantic web is where machines read web pages as humans do today. A web where search engines and software agents peruse "the Net" and find us what we're looking for. Some of the technologies required to perform such tasks exist today including the Resource description Framework (RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL). These work by adding all sorts of machine readable metadata to human readable web pages.
The web 2.0 technologies are beginning to trickle into real-world sites, service experiences, and tools. Examples of these technologies can be seen with Yahoo!'s food site, which is driven by semantic metadata, the semantic portal developed by Radar Networks, the Jena development platform being creating at HP, and the Oracle Spatial database.
Just as much of life, the semantic web is a good-news, bad-news thing. You can do all these wonderfully complex queries, but it takes a tremendous amount of time and metadata to make it happen. This is due to having to completely re-annotate the entire Web in order to make existing web pages machine readable.
For this reason, many researchers opt for a very different approach to the semantic web. Instead of an overhaul of Web formats, they're building agents that can better understand the Web pages of today. The pages aren't easier to read, but rather the software agents are getting smarter.
There is yet another view of the semantic web taken by so called "semantic searchers". Rather than providing automatic information retrieval, semantic search engines seek to improve on the Google-like search model that we've grown so accustomed to. the idea is to move beyond mere keyword searches to a better understanding of natural-language queries. This type of natural-language processing has been in development for years and now is beginning to find its way onto the public Web.
One could argue, however, that while many associate Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web, the two are far from synonymous. There are countless other concepts ready to alter our online experiences of the future. Many of these concepts go beyond semantics using space, images, and sound.
One such concept is the so called 3D Web, a Web you can walk through. This has been seen as an extension to the "virtual worlds" popping up on today's Web. It has been said that the Web of the future will be the big alternate universe reminiscent of Second Like and There.com.
As with everything in like there are those who scoff at this notion of the 3d Web. They see the 3D Web as a re-creation of our existing world. On the 3D Web, you can take a virtual tour of an unfamiliar neighborhood and shop for houses or visit famous sites you've never seen. Google earth already offers a similar experience. The problem is that 3D only goes so far and doesn't enhance the 2D world of text, pictures, and video. An interesting idea beginning to emerge is that of a media-centric Web which offers not only language-based search but pure media search. Today's searching mechanisms rely primarily on keywords, even when searching for images, videos, and songs, this is a woefully inadequate approach. Some companies are looking to reinvent media search, hinting at a world where we search for media with other media, not just keywords.
Speaking of web 2.0 and web 3.0, some are already talking about a web 4.0, dubbed the ubiquitous (or pervasive) web. The Web already reaches beyond the desktop, to cell phones and handhelds, but who says it has to stop there? What about having the windows in your home open automatically when the temperature changes? By leveraging mesh networks, wireless networks consisting of tiny nodes that can route data to and from almost anywhere, the possibilities are endless. However, regarding web 2.0, web 3.0, and web 4.0, perhaps we should all avoid getting into a naming competition.
Random Observations
Ruby is an open-source all-purpose, object-oriented scripting language that was developed in Japan in 1995. Rails is a open-source, full-stack, Model-View-Controller (MVC) web framework, designed using the Ruby programming language. Because of Ruby's dynamic nature, Rails provides many exciting features for programmers, such as easy database access and methods to utilize some of the newest technologies on the web.
Service Component Architecture (SCA) is another significant new development. Many of the vendors in the consortium that created it (www.osoa.org) have products in the pipeline that conform to SCA. However, because of the breadth of capability, and the sheer number of vendors involved, Gartner expects the formal ratification process to take a long time. They also expect that this will suffer from the usual challenges with vendor-led standards, in that many vendors will create implementations that conform to the standard, but that also contain significant extensions that are useful to customers. This will leave organizations with the choice between retaining interoperability, and conforming to the standard at the cost of additional programming time or by using these convenience features and accepting limitations on the interoperability.
Start to look for higher-level standards, such as WS-SX and WS-RX, within the near term, as they become mature (WS-SX = Web-Services Secure Exchange; WS-RX = Web-Services Reliable Exchange).
“Net Gen” kids now entering workforce and consumer market and will demand web 2.0 capabilities, potentially having a large impact on corporations. There are 80 million people ages 8 to 28 in U.S. alone.
SOAs don’t finish; it’s a journey, not a destination.
Three main ways to approach SOA: REST/POX, web services, and proprietary methods.
English has been dominant language in blogs but Japanese is about to catch up or pass English as dominant language.
Blogs can be particularly helpful for technology evangelism, project management, standards work, technology change management. Social networking is useful in finding needed expertise (i.e. LinkedIn, myspace, facebook). For instance, one could use facebook or myspace in a corporation to describe specific projects, technologies, skills, etc. One idea is to make a matrix of stakeholders vertically and horizontally and brainstorm on potential reasons why such people might collaborate.
Mashups are predicted to become dominant form of composite applications. These do not have to be limited to map data. A mashup is simply the idea of bringing together two or more different data sets.
AJAX is not new. Pioneers in AJAX technology include outlook web access (circa 1998) and desktop.com (circa 1999).
BPM really has very little to do with IT; its mostly a management discipline.
TOGAF is the defacto enterprise architecture framework standard. TOGAF provides specific methods in its ADM. TOGAF is frequently applied to SOA.
WS-I provides ws-i conformance tools. Can be downloaded from WS-I site. Mindreef, IBM, Microsoft, Parasoft all have versions of these tests.
Aspect-oriented programming (AOP), and aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) are gaining momentum. See wikipedia for more information.
In late 2006, Target was sued by National Federation for the Blind for having a web site inaccessible to the blind. Results could have large impact.
Microsoft introduced Silverlight about 2 months ago to compete against Adobe’s Flash.
About two weeks ago Microsoft released a tool to allow non-IT people to build mash-ups.
Mission critical applications deployed as a mashup is risky as its dependent on external data.
There are 100+ AJAX vendors, including tools and vendors Adobe Flash, Eclipse RCP, Microsoft WPF and Silverlight, and IBM Expeditor.
Sun has introduced JavaFX to compete with Flash and Silverlight.
There appears to be no correlation between EA maturity and how long one has been doing it. Architecture impact remains low. This indicates that there a lot of companies are doing lots of work but it is not making any difference.
Try to avoid modelitis (the compulsive drawing of lots of pretty models) even though it is fun to play with cool tools.
Avoid “management by magazine”.
Know standard ISO/IEC 42010 or ANSI/IEEE 1471-2000
DoDAF, FEAF, TOGAF, Gartner, Zachman are all examples of architecture frameworks.
Some SOA Best Practices
Start by looking at REST/POX. If a problem can be solved via REST/POX, then focus there. If the problem needs more capabilities than REST/POX provides, then move up to Web services, and eventually to proprietary approaches, as necessary. This may seem to increase the complexity of a single solution, but in reality, it simplifies the overall solution. Many features will be implemented with the simplistic REST/POX approach, which will reduce the number of complex proprietary approaches and more-complicated Web services approaches. Use the right tool for the right job, and ensure that your toolkit includes REST/POX, Web services and proprietary approaches.
Today's programmatic access uses a combination of REST/POX, Web services and proprietary approaches. For new development, start simple and step up as required.
Create a service when:
• Crossing a boundary
• Seeking more than one reuse scenario
• Providing a significant business process
• Invoking a more-complex process
• Requesting information
• Exposing a high-level API
• Exposing public data
• Needs to be shared
• Needs to be explicitly defined and described
• Changing frequently
• Describing a discrete function
• You want capabilities instead of features
Avoid a service when:
• Performance is paramount
• Working within one system
• Transferring large data sets
• Executing transactions
• Data is of extremely fine granularity
Websites worthy of review
http://www.writely.com
http://www.riya.com
http://iscrybe.com/main/index.php
https://www.youos.com
http://www.zoho.com
http://www.pageflakes.com
http://googlesuggest.com
http://tiddlywiki.com
http://secondlife.com
http://www.socialtext.com
http://www.goowy.com
http://www.digg.com
Various statistics relevant to IT
• Gartner predicts that SOA will be partly used in more than 80% of new, mission-critical applications and business processes designed by 2010.
• Through 2009, organizations that do not consider data integration and data quality as critical components of SOA will double their risk of failure in SOA-related projects (0.8 probability).
• Through 2008, the majority of Global 1000 companies will adopt the technology-related aspects of the Web 2.0 phenomenon, but fail to adopt the aspects of Web 2.0 that have a social dimension. The result will have a minimal business impact (0.6 probability).
• Organizations that align their BPM and SOA initiatives in 2007 will double their likelihood of becoming industry leaders by 2011 (0.7 probability).
• Web architectural style will be used in more than 75% of new applications by 2012 (0.8 probability).
• By 2012, 75% of practitioners of the current style of SOA will have failed to measurably improve their application agility (0.8 probability).
• By 2012, current forms of service-oriented architecture (SOA) will be considered legacy architectural styles (0.9 probability).
• By 2010, Web mashups will be the dominant model (80%) for the creation of composite enterprise applications (0.7 probability).
• The high cost and complexity of information integration continues to eat at 30% to 40% of most corporate IT budgets.
• Organizations building an enterprise architecture will achieve marginal to no benefits during the first three years following its implementation without explicit links to software process and behavioral change (0.8 probability).
• By 2010, 40% of existing EA programs will be stopped (0.9 probability). Failure to define value leads to a failure to deliver value, which leads to a failure of confidence, which leads to EA program failures.
• Fully mature semantic reconciliation tools will not be available until 2011 (0.7 probability). By the end of 2009, 40% of a global company's data will be defined in some way by XML (0.7 probability).
• By the end of 2009, 75% of the Fortune 500's interapplication messaging infrastructure will be formatted in XML (0.7 probability).
• By 2010, web-oriented architecture will account for 60% of SOA development in the enterprise (0.7 probability).
• Through 2010, lack of working SOA governance arrangements will be the most common reason for SOA failure (0.8 probability).
• SOA is currently at trough of disillusionment. 2-5 years mainstream adoption.
• By 2010, about $1 of every $3 spent on IT professional services will be spent on a solution using SOA, Web services or Web 2.0 (0.8 probability).
• According to Gartner Dataquest, in 2006, the worldwide market for IT professional services involving Web services or Web 2.0 was $58.9 billion, and the market will grow at a compound annual rate of 27% to reach $152.4 billion by 2010. Growth will be fastest in development and integration services through 2009 pending the availability of a critical mass of commercially available SOBAs.
• Through 2009, lack of SOA, Web services and Web 2.0 skills will require enterprises to obtain expertise from service or software providers for 70% of their projects involving these technologies (0.8 probability).
• Through 2010, fewer than 25% of large companies will have developed the technical and organizational skills needed to deliver enterprisewide SOA (0.8 probability).
• By 2008, 50% of companies will use Web 2.0-style services in their SOA initiatives (0.8 probability).
• Gartner predicts that SOA will be partly used in more than 80% of new, mission-critical applications and business processes designed by 2010.
• By 2011, at least 80% of all commercial software solutions will include elements of open source (0.8 probability).
• By 2010, WOA will account for 60% of SOA deployment in the enterprise (0.7 probability).
The contents below can be grouped into the following topics:
• General overview
• Web Oriented Architecture
• Web 2.0
• Web 3.0 and Web 4.0
• Random Observations
• Some SOA Best Practices
• Websites worthy of review
• Various statistics relevant to IT
General overview
The conference was interesting, not least of which Gartner predicts that SOA is already becoming legacy and among many other topics there is a new buzzword (since 2006, I believe) which is WOA (Web Oriented Architecture). One thing I did get some clarity on is that there is no such thing as a SOA architect! This may be obvious to you, the reader, but in the past year I have repeatedly heard this label used almost as a job position. SOA is simply a design pattern! The correct terminology is to speak of a solutions architect who employs among other design patterns, the SOA design pattern. ESB is also simply a design pattern. There was some discussion that ESBs may impede progress within the SOA strategy and it was forecasted that the ESB may even start to become obsolete within the next two years. Speaking of obsolescence, some analysts are actually even starting to consider AJAX as already becoming obsolete (although it will still be THE major technology for rich internet applications for the next couple of years). I was alerted to the importance in learning TOGAF in addition to FEA and DODAF.
Web Oriented Architecture
Web-oriented architecture (WOA) is based on the principles of REST. Representational state transfer (REST) is the style of the Web, and its principles should be followed for any SOA project.
What is the architecture of the Web, and how is it different from SOA? Although there are many formal definitions of SOA, the market is coalescing around a practical meaning for the term, which includes the following: SOA is about applications; while service orientation is a concept that can be applied to many things (storage area network is a service-oriented approach to storage), which does not make it SOA. SOA is about how one designs applications as the providers and consumers of a set of defined, agreed-upon interfaces (services). In this way, services are a unit of modularity in the same way that subroutines, objects and components are units of modularity. Modularity is how we have improved the ability of programs and our ability to create more complex and integrated software. A key concept in the current modularity that SOA provides is that it incorporates encapsulation. In other words, the service interface is the only means of accessing anything about that service or the information it manages. A key attribute of these new modules is that they are shared, not reused. This means that the definitions that constrain their operation are shared as well. Another thing that is critical to the value of SOA is the fact that the only thing these modules must have in common is the network. That network — a Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) network or its logical equivalent — is the only means of access. This removes any dependency on development time components. The definition of a service is not its WSDL or its implementation code, but how it is manifested over the wire, which eliminates any technological dependency on anything except the application wire protocol. The final assumption is that modules are mostly the same as a subroutine or other structured code component. Thus, some say that current SOA initiatives follow a different architectural pattern than the Web and, therefore, cannot be expected to deliver some of the benefits that are inherent in the Web-oriented pattern.
The only real difference between traditional SOA and the concept of WOA is that WOA advocates REST, an increasingly popular, powerful, and simple method of leveraging HTTP as a Web service in its own right (and carefully devised by the co-creator of HTTP, Roy Fielding.)
WOA itself is a reflection of the classic Reach vs. Rich argument, in that richness is an outcome of robustness and complexity but cuts down how much reach you have to others, particularly in heterogeneous communities. Some say that the modern SOA technologies and architectures have become a near-morass of complex standards, protocols, and products, and that the result is that the present list of WS-* standards is nearly incomprehensible.
This is making some people fall back to simpler and more straightforward methods that work, while hiding the protocol complexity in the application state. Some say that one doesn’t usually need anything more complex than XML and HTTP, one of the most scalable, proven, and widespread protocols on the planet, along with HTTP’s verbs: GET, POST, PUT, DELETE.
REST does not handle enterprise issues like two-phase commit, messaging, and asynchronicity. WOA is definitely not the hammer for every job. Certain applications, particularly in the high-end of the enterprise, require the more sophisticated portions of the SOA stack (don’t forget, WOA is a subset of SOA and is not disjoint as long as you follow the principles of service orientation). However, for many uses, WOA is the most interoperable, easiest to implement, and most highly scalable technique for building open web services.
Web 2.0
Much of the conference was centered on Web 2.0. One of the languages used in AJAX web application programming is "JavaScript Object Notation" (JSON) which is pronounced like the English name Jason. JSON is based on a subset of the JavaScript Programming Language. JSON is a fast, compact representational format that has advantages when used with JavaScript (as is found in browsers). XML, when used with browsers, must be parsed and processed by JavaScript while JSON is simply "consumed" directly. This lightweight data-interchange format is easy for humans to read and write, and easy for machines to parse and generate. JSON is a text format that is completely language independent but uses conventions familiar to programmers of the C-family of languages, including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python, and many others. These properties make JSON an ideal data-interchange language. It provides a simple alternative to XML for asynchronously transmitting structured information between a client and its server. In December 2005, Yahoo! began offering some of its Web Services optionally in JSON. Google started offering JSON feeds for its GData web protocol in December 2006.
Web 3.0 and Web 4.0
Have you ever wondered what the Internet will look like in the future? Most people have heard of some aspect of what has been called web 2.0. You know things like social networking, lightweight programming, web as a platform, and collective intelligence. Most people recognize these by their street names Facebook, AJAX, Google Maps, and wikipedia respectively.
Many people refer to Web 3.0 as the semantic web. The semantic web is where machines read web pages as humans do today. A web where search engines and software agents peruse "the Net" and find us what we're looking for. Some of the technologies required to perform such tasks exist today including the Resource description Framework (RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL). These work by adding all sorts of machine readable metadata to human readable web pages.
The web 2.0 technologies are beginning to trickle into real-world sites, service experiences, and tools. Examples of these technologies can be seen with Yahoo!'s food site, which is driven by semantic metadata, the semantic portal developed by Radar Networks, the Jena development platform being creating at HP, and the Oracle Spatial database.
Just as much of life, the semantic web is a good-news, bad-news thing. You can do all these wonderfully complex queries, but it takes a tremendous amount of time and metadata to make it happen. This is due to having to completely re-annotate the entire Web in order to make existing web pages machine readable.
For this reason, many researchers opt for a very different approach to the semantic web. Instead of an overhaul of Web formats, they're building agents that can better understand the Web pages of today. The pages aren't easier to read, but rather the software agents are getting smarter.
There is yet another view of the semantic web taken by so called "semantic searchers". Rather than providing automatic information retrieval, semantic search engines seek to improve on the Google-like search model that we've grown so accustomed to. the idea is to move beyond mere keyword searches to a better understanding of natural-language queries. This type of natural-language processing has been in development for years and now is beginning to find its way onto the public Web.
One could argue, however, that while many associate Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web, the two are far from synonymous. There are countless other concepts ready to alter our online experiences of the future. Many of these concepts go beyond semantics using space, images, and sound.
One such concept is the so called 3D Web, a Web you can walk through. This has been seen as an extension to the "virtual worlds" popping up on today's Web. It has been said that the Web of the future will be the big alternate universe reminiscent of Second Like and There.com.
As with everything in like there are those who scoff at this notion of the 3d Web. They see the 3D Web as a re-creation of our existing world. On the 3D Web, you can take a virtual tour of an unfamiliar neighborhood and shop for houses or visit famous sites you've never seen. Google earth already offers a similar experience. The problem is that 3D only goes so far and doesn't enhance the 2D world of text, pictures, and video. An interesting idea beginning to emerge is that of a media-centric Web which offers not only language-based search but pure media search. Today's searching mechanisms rely primarily on keywords, even when searching for images, videos, and songs, this is a woefully inadequate approach. Some companies are looking to reinvent media search, hinting at a world where we search for media with other media, not just keywords.
Speaking of web 2.0 and web 3.0, some are already talking about a web 4.0, dubbed the ubiquitous (or pervasive) web. The Web already reaches beyond the desktop, to cell phones and handhelds, but who says it has to stop there? What about having the windows in your home open automatically when the temperature changes? By leveraging mesh networks, wireless networks consisting of tiny nodes that can route data to and from almost anywhere, the possibilities are endless. However, regarding web 2.0, web 3.0, and web 4.0, perhaps we should all avoid getting into a naming competition.
Random Observations
Ruby is an open-source all-purpose, object-oriented scripting language that was developed in Japan in 1995. Rails is a open-source, full-stack, Model-View-Controller (MVC) web framework, designed using the Ruby programming language. Because of Ruby's dynamic nature, Rails provides many exciting features for programmers, such as easy database access and methods to utilize some of the newest technologies on the web.
Service Component Architecture (SCA) is another significant new development. Many of the vendors in the consortium that created it (www.osoa.org) have products in the pipeline that conform to SCA. However, because of the breadth of capability, and the sheer number of vendors involved, Gartner expects the formal ratification process to take a long time. They also expect that this will suffer from the usual challenges with vendor-led standards, in that many vendors will create implementations that conform to the standard, but that also contain significant extensions that are useful to customers. This will leave organizations with the choice between retaining interoperability, and conforming to the standard at the cost of additional programming time or by using these convenience features and accepting limitations on the interoperability.
Start to look for higher-level standards, such as WS-SX and WS-RX, within the near term, as they become mature (WS-SX = Web-Services Secure Exchange; WS-RX = Web-Services Reliable Exchange).
“Net Gen” kids now entering workforce and consumer market and will demand web 2.0 capabilities, potentially having a large impact on corporations. There are 80 million people ages 8 to 28 in U.S. alone.
SOAs don’t finish; it’s a journey, not a destination.
Three main ways to approach SOA: REST/POX, web services, and proprietary methods.
English has been dominant language in blogs but Japanese is about to catch up or pass English as dominant language.
Blogs can be particularly helpful for technology evangelism, project management, standards work, technology change management. Social networking is useful in finding needed expertise (i.e. LinkedIn, myspace, facebook). For instance, one could use facebook or myspace in a corporation to describe specific projects, technologies, skills, etc. One idea is to make a matrix of stakeholders vertically and horizontally and brainstorm on potential reasons why such people might collaborate.
Mashups are predicted to become dominant form of composite applications. These do not have to be limited to map data. A mashup is simply the idea of bringing together two or more different data sets.
AJAX is not new. Pioneers in AJAX technology include outlook web access (circa 1998) and desktop.com (circa 1999).
BPM really has very little to do with IT; its mostly a management discipline.
TOGAF is the defacto enterprise architecture framework standard. TOGAF provides specific methods in its ADM. TOGAF is frequently applied to SOA.
WS-I provides ws-i conformance tools. Can be downloaded from WS-I site. Mindreef, IBM, Microsoft, Parasoft all have versions of these tests.
Aspect-oriented programming (AOP), and aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) are gaining momentum. See wikipedia for more information.
In late 2006, Target was sued by National Federation for the Blind for having a web site inaccessible to the blind. Results could have large impact.
Microsoft introduced Silverlight about 2 months ago to compete against Adobe’s Flash.
About two weeks ago Microsoft released a tool to allow non-IT people to build mash-ups.
Mission critical applications deployed as a mashup is risky as its dependent on external data.
There are 100+ AJAX vendors, including tools and vendors Adobe Flash, Eclipse RCP, Microsoft WPF and Silverlight, and IBM Expeditor.
Sun has introduced JavaFX to compete with Flash and Silverlight.
There appears to be no correlation between EA maturity and how long one has been doing it. Architecture impact remains low. This indicates that there a lot of companies are doing lots of work but it is not making any difference.
Try to avoid modelitis (the compulsive drawing of lots of pretty models) even though it is fun to play with cool tools.
Avoid “management by magazine”.
Know standard ISO/IEC 42010 or ANSI/IEEE 1471-2000
DoDAF, FEAF, TOGAF, Gartner, Zachman are all examples of architecture frameworks.
Some SOA Best Practices
Start by looking at REST/POX. If a problem can be solved via REST/POX, then focus there. If the problem needs more capabilities than REST/POX provides, then move up to Web services, and eventually to proprietary approaches, as necessary. This may seem to increase the complexity of a single solution, but in reality, it simplifies the overall solution. Many features will be implemented with the simplistic REST/POX approach, which will reduce the number of complex proprietary approaches and more-complicated Web services approaches. Use the right tool for the right job, and ensure that your toolkit includes REST/POX, Web services and proprietary approaches.
Today's programmatic access uses a combination of REST/POX, Web services and proprietary approaches. For new development, start simple and step up as required.
Create a service when:
• Crossing a boundary
• Seeking more than one reuse scenario
• Providing a significant business process
• Invoking a more-complex process
• Requesting information
• Exposing a high-level API
• Exposing public data
• Needs to be shared
• Needs to be explicitly defined and described
• Changing frequently
• Describing a discrete function
• You want capabilities instead of features
Avoid a service when:
• Performance is paramount
• Working within one system
• Transferring large data sets
• Executing transactions
• Data is of extremely fine granularity
Websites worthy of review
http://www.writely.com
http://www.riya.com
http://iscrybe.com/main/index.php
https://www.youos.com
http://www.zoho.com
http://www.pageflakes.com
http://googlesuggest.com
http://tiddlywiki.com
http://secondlife.com
http://www.socialtext.com
http://www.goowy.com
http://www.digg.com
Various statistics relevant to IT
• Gartner predicts that SOA will be partly used in more than 80% of new, mission-critical applications and business processes designed by 2010.
• Through 2009, organizations that do not consider data integration and data quality as critical components of SOA will double their risk of failure in SOA-related projects (0.8 probability).
• Through 2008, the majority of Global 1000 companies will adopt the technology-related aspects of the Web 2.0 phenomenon, but fail to adopt the aspects of Web 2.0 that have a social dimension. The result will have a minimal business impact (0.6 probability).
• Organizations that align their BPM and SOA initiatives in 2007 will double their likelihood of becoming industry leaders by 2011 (0.7 probability).
• Web architectural style will be used in more than 75% of new applications by 2012 (0.8 probability).
• By 2012, 75% of practitioners of the current style of SOA will have failed to measurably improve their application agility (0.8 probability).
• By 2012, current forms of service-oriented architecture (SOA) will be considered legacy architectural styles (0.9 probability).
• By 2010, Web mashups will be the dominant model (80%) for the creation of composite enterprise applications (0.7 probability).
• The high cost and complexity of information integration continues to eat at 30% to 40% of most corporate IT budgets.
• Organizations building an enterprise architecture will achieve marginal to no benefits during the first three years following its implementation without explicit links to software process and behavioral change (0.8 probability).
• By 2010, 40% of existing EA programs will be stopped (0.9 probability). Failure to define value leads to a failure to deliver value, which leads to a failure of confidence, which leads to EA program failures.
• Fully mature semantic reconciliation tools will not be available until 2011 (0.7 probability). By the end of 2009, 40% of a global company's data will be defined in some way by XML (0.7 probability).
• By the end of 2009, 75% of the Fortune 500's interapplication messaging infrastructure will be formatted in XML (0.7 probability).
• By 2010, web-oriented architecture will account for 60% of SOA development in the enterprise (0.7 probability).
• Through 2010, lack of working SOA governance arrangements will be the most common reason for SOA failure (0.8 probability).
• SOA is currently at trough of disillusionment. 2-5 years mainstream adoption.
• By 2010, about $1 of every $3 spent on IT professional services will be spent on a solution using SOA, Web services or Web 2.0 (0.8 probability).
• According to Gartner Dataquest, in 2006, the worldwide market for IT professional services involving Web services or Web 2.0 was $58.9 billion, and the market will grow at a compound annual rate of 27% to reach $152.4 billion by 2010. Growth will be fastest in development and integration services through 2009 pending the availability of a critical mass of commercially available SOBAs.
• Through 2009, lack of SOA, Web services and Web 2.0 skills will require enterprises to obtain expertise from service or software providers for 70% of their projects involving these technologies (0.8 probability).
• Through 2010, fewer than 25% of large companies will have developed the technical and organizational skills needed to deliver enterprisewide SOA (0.8 probability).
• By 2008, 50% of companies will use Web 2.0-style services in their SOA initiatives (0.8 probability).
• Gartner predicts that SOA will be partly used in more than 80% of new, mission-critical applications and business processes designed by 2010.
• By 2011, at least 80% of all commercial software solutions will include elements of open source (0.8 probability).
• By 2010, WOA will account for 60% of SOA deployment in the enterprise (0.7 probability).
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
This is a co-worker's brother-in-law (see article below). He is all over the place, including at last week's Gartner's SOA conference that I attended. I will be writing a trip report as time permits although perhaps not as lengthy as my last trip report as time is becoming a bit of a luxury. The conference was very interesting, not least of which they predict that SOA is already becoming legacy and among many other topics there is a new buzzword (since 2006, I believe) which is WOA (Web Oriented Architecture). WOA basically refers to the REST method. Gartner indicated that best practice is to adopt WOA when you can instead of SOA. One thing I did get some clarity on is that there is no such thing as a SOA architect! This may be obvious to all of you but in the past year I have repeatedly heard this label used almost as a job position. SOA is simply just a design pattern! The correct terminology is to speak of a solutions architect who employs among other design patterns, the SOA design pattern. We all know that the ESB is also just a design pattern. And now there is discussion that ESBs may actually impede progress within the SOA strategy and it is forecasted that the ESB may also become obsolete within the next two years. Speaking of obsolescence, did you know that some actually even consider AJAX as already becoming obsolete (although it will still be THE major technology for rich internet applications for the next couple of years). Anyway, I have a lot to report -- it was a very productive week as I attended two separate conferences, one on SOA and one on Enterprise Architecture (hint: we need to all learn TOGAF in addition to FEA and DODAF) -- and I will try to provide a summary of some of what I have learned by the end of the week. I have all of the PDFs if anyone is interested. I also ordered the multimedia CD from the SOA conference (not the EA one though as I thought this was all just too much money). By the way, Java and C# are out; Ruby on Rails is now the *hot* language and web application foundation with Python being a close second hot language. (I wish things would slow down a bit so I could get a good grasp *smile*) And hey if anyone can figure out what to do with Second Life, please let me know! I know IBM hosts conferences there as well as a multitude of other companies but I find it very difficult to use.
How Much Will Your SOA Cost?
By: David S. Linthicum, CEO, Linthicum Group
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
I'm consulting now...at the project and strategy levels...and thus finding that a lot of real work needs to be done to get SOAs up-and-running. For most organizations, the first step of their SOA project is to figure out how much this SOA will cost. Thus, you can budget appropriately and obtain the funding.
It’s a good first step, but most organizations that want to build an SOA don't have a clue how to approach the cost estimation process. In many cases, they grossly underestimate the cost of their SOA, hoping their bosses and accountants won't notice later. In other words, go in low to get the approval, and reveal the higher costs later after it's too late...the investment has been made. Not a good management practice, if you ask me, but a pretty common one.
So, how do you calculate the cost of an SOA? While you can't cost out an SOA like a construction project, many of the same notions apply, including: understanding the domain, understanding how much required resources cost, and understanding how the work will get done. Moreover, understand what can go wrong and account for it.
Here are some very “general" guidelines:
Budget to budget. The problem that I'm seeing over and over again is that cost estimates are provided without a clear understanding of the work needed to be done. Indeed, you need to budget some time to create the budget. This means understanding the domain in detail, including:
1. Number of data elements
2. Complexity of data storage technology
3. System complexity
4. Service complexity
5. Process complexity
6. New services needed.
7. Enabling technology
8. Applicable standards
9. Potential risks
Typically it's expressed as:
Cost of SOA = (Cost of Data Complexity + Cost of Service Complexity + Cost of Process Complexity + Enabling Technology Solution)
For instance:
Cost of Data Complexity = (((Number of Data Elements) * Complexity of the Data Storage Technology) * Labor Units))
• Number of Data Elements being the number of semantics you're tracking in your domain, new or derived.
• Complexity of the Data Storage Technology, expressed as a percentage between 0 and 1 (0% to 100%). For instance, Relational is a .3, Object-Oriented is a .6, and ISAM is a .8.
So, at $100 a labor unit, or the amount of money it takes to understand and refine one data element, we could have:
Cost of Data Complexity = (((3,000) * .8) * $100)
Or, Cost of Data Complexity = $150,000 USD Or, the amount of money needed to both understand and refine the data so it fits into your SOA, which is a small part of the overall project by the way.
If you get this, you can get the rest of the cost analysis procedure; just reapply the same notions to:
Cost of Service Complexity
Cost of Process Complexity
Enabling Technology Solution
Some things to remember:
1. This is not really metrics (e.g., function points), because we really don't have historical data to abstract here. In essence, you need to use your own project management and project costing methods; just apply them to this new approach, using the formulas I'm suggesting above.
2. Count on 10 to 20 percent variations in cost for the simple reason that we've not walked down this road before. As we move from project to project, we'll get better at costing out SOA.
3. Make sure you dial in at least 2 major mistakes, meaning, selecting the wrong vendor, or hiring the wrong architect. You may encounter more, but it will almost never be less.
4. Make sure to change cost estimates as scope creep occurs, and it always does. The nice things about using formulas such as the ones I’m expressing here is that, as change occurs, you can quickly see the effect on the budget. Moreover, as change occurs later in the SOA projects, the cost of change goes up exponentially.
Finally, here is a sensible, no-nonsense approach to costing out SOA. While the actual numeric assumptions may be debatable, it's the approach that's refreshing. It would be great to see people start using this model, sharing any data points and providing feedback so it could be refined. Clearly, this would benefit the IT community a lot. I plan to develop a much more sophisticated model in the near future. If you’re interested, let me know, I’ll post it on my Web site.
David Linthicum (Dave) is an internationally known application integration and service oriented architecture expert. In his career Dave has formed many of the ideas behind modern distributed computing including EAI (enterprise application integration), B2B application integration, and service oriented architecture (SOA), approaches and technologies in wide use today.
Currently, Dave is the CEO of the Linthicum Group, LLC, a consulting organization dedicated to excellence in SOA product development, SOA implementation, and corporate SOA strategy. Dave is formerly the CEO of BRIDGEWERX, and is also the former CTO of Mercator Software and has held key technology management roles with a number of organizations including CTO of SAGA Software, Mobil Oil, EDS, AT&T, and Ernst and Young.
How Much Will Your SOA Cost?
By: David S. Linthicum, CEO, Linthicum Group
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
I'm consulting now...at the project and strategy levels...and thus finding that a lot of real work needs to be done to get SOAs up-and-running. For most organizations, the first step of their SOA project is to figure out how much this SOA will cost. Thus, you can budget appropriately and obtain the funding.
It’s a good first step, but most organizations that want to build an SOA don't have a clue how to approach the cost estimation process. In many cases, they grossly underestimate the cost of their SOA, hoping their bosses and accountants won't notice later. In other words, go in low to get the approval, and reveal the higher costs later after it's too late...the investment has been made. Not a good management practice, if you ask me, but a pretty common one.
So, how do you calculate the cost of an SOA? While you can't cost out an SOA like a construction project, many of the same notions apply, including: understanding the domain, understanding how much required resources cost, and understanding how the work will get done. Moreover, understand what can go wrong and account for it.
Here are some very “general" guidelines:
Budget to budget. The problem that I'm seeing over and over again is that cost estimates are provided without a clear understanding of the work needed to be done. Indeed, you need to budget some time to create the budget. This means understanding the domain in detail, including:
1. Number of data elements
2. Complexity of data storage technology
3. System complexity
4. Service complexity
5. Process complexity
6. New services needed.
7. Enabling technology
8. Applicable standards
9. Potential risks
Typically it's expressed as:
Cost of SOA = (Cost of Data Complexity + Cost of Service Complexity + Cost of Process Complexity + Enabling Technology Solution)
For instance:
Cost of Data Complexity = (((Number of Data Elements) * Complexity of the Data Storage Technology) * Labor Units))
• Number of Data Elements being the number of semantics you're tracking in your domain, new or derived.
• Complexity of the Data Storage Technology, expressed as a percentage between 0 and 1 (0% to 100%). For instance, Relational is a .3, Object-Oriented is a .6, and ISAM is a .8.
So, at $100 a labor unit, or the amount of money it takes to understand and refine one data element, we could have:
Cost of Data Complexity = (((3,000) * .8) * $100)
Or, Cost of Data Complexity = $150,000 USD Or, the amount of money needed to both understand and refine the data so it fits into your SOA, which is a small part of the overall project by the way.
If you get this, you can get the rest of the cost analysis procedure; just reapply the same notions to:
Cost of Service Complexity
Cost of Process Complexity
Enabling Technology Solution
Some things to remember:
1. This is not really metrics (e.g., function points), because we really don't have historical data to abstract here. In essence, you need to use your own project management and project costing methods; just apply them to this new approach, using the formulas I'm suggesting above.
2. Count on 10 to 20 percent variations in cost for the simple reason that we've not walked down this road before. As we move from project to project, we'll get better at costing out SOA.
3. Make sure you dial in at least 2 major mistakes, meaning, selecting the wrong vendor, or hiring the wrong architect. You may encounter more, but it will almost never be less.
4. Make sure to change cost estimates as scope creep occurs, and it always does. The nice things about using formulas such as the ones I’m expressing here is that, as change occurs, you can quickly see the effect on the budget. Moreover, as change occurs later in the SOA projects, the cost of change goes up exponentially.
Finally, here is a sensible, no-nonsense approach to costing out SOA. While the actual numeric assumptions may be debatable, it's the approach that's refreshing. It would be great to see people start using this model, sharing any data points and providing feedback so it could be refined. Clearly, this would benefit the IT community a lot. I plan to develop a much more sophisticated model in the near future. If you’re interested, let me know, I’ll post it on my Web site.
David Linthicum (Dave) is an internationally known application integration and service oriented architecture expert. In his career Dave has formed many of the ideas behind modern distributed computing including EAI (enterprise application integration), B2B application integration, and service oriented architecture (SOA), approaches and technologies in wide use today.
Currently, Dave is the CEO of the Linthicum Group, LLC, a consulting organization dedicated to excellence in SOA product development, SOA implementation, and corporate SOA strategy. Dave is formerly the CEO of BRIDGEWERX, and is also the former CTO of Mercator Software and has held key technology management roles with a number of organizations including CTO of SAGA Software, Mobil Oil, EDS, AT&T, and Ernst and Young.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Blogging reaching its peak In 2007
Blogging may witness its peak time in the year 2007, with the number of blogs leveling out at 100 million. According to technology predictions by analysts at the research company Gartner, almost 200 million people have already stopped writing their blogs. Daryl Plummer, chief Gartner fellow, said that although some people who make a blog get bored and forget about maintaining it, others love it and are committed to keeping it up. "A lot of people have been in and out of this thing," Plummer said, according to BBC. "Everyone thinks they have something to say, until they're put on stage and asked to say it." Last month the blog-tracking firm Technorati reported that nearly 100,000 new blogs were being created every day, and 1.3 million blog posts were written. The firm, which is keeping track of more than 57 million blogs, says around 55% are "active" and updated at least every three months.
ROI and SOA
This video was also published by TIBCO. Good to see someone has a sense of humor. *smile*
SOA
I just spent a week at two Gartner conferences, which I will blog about later. But I was shown this cute little video:
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
back from vacation/study on software piracy
I am back from a wonderful vacation to the Black Hills! Anyway, I thought I would share this information concerning software piracy.
From IDC
Worldwide Software Piracy Rate Holds Steady at 35%, Global Losses Up 15%
15 May 2007
Piracy Rate in China Drops 10% in Three Years
WASHINGTON, D.C., May 15, 2007 — A new study reveals that 35% of the software installed in 2006 on personal computers (PCs) worldwide was obtained illegally, amounting to nearly $40 billion in global losses due to software piracy. Progress was seen in a number of emerging markets, most notably in China, where the piracy rate dropped ten percentage points in three years, and in Russia, where piracy fell seven percentage points over three years.
These are among the findings of the fourth annual global PC software piracy study released today by the Business Software Alliance (BSA), an international association representing the commercial software industry. The study was conducted independently by IDC, the information technology (IT) industry's leading global market research and forecasting firm.
"The good news is we are making progress, however, we still have a lot of work to do to reduce unacceptable levels of piracy," said BSA President and CEO Robert Holleyman. "These significant losses translate into negative impacts on IT industry employment, revenues, and financial resources available for future innovation and the development of new technologies."
Worldwide, for every two dollars of software purchased legitimately, one dollar was obtained illegally. Global losses increased in 2006 by more than $5 billion (15%) over the previous year. Of the 102 countries covered in this year's study, piracy rates dropped moderately in sixty-two countries, while increasing in thirteen.
China's piracy rate dropped four percentage points for the second consecutive year and has dropped ten percentage points in the last three years, from 92% in 2003 to 82% in 2006. By reducing China's piracy rate by ten percentage points over three years, $864 million in losses was saved, according to IDC. The reduction in the piracy rate and the savings are the result of government efforts to increase the use of legitimate software within its own departments, vendor arrangements with PC suppliers to use legitimate software, and increasing industry and government education and enforcement efforts. The legitimate software market in China grew to nearly $1.2 billion in 2006, an increase of 88% over 2005. Since 2003, the legitimate software market in China has grown over 358%.
"Considering the vast PC growth taking place in the Chinese IT market, this continued decline in China's software piracy rate is quite promising," said Holleyman. "BSA is encouraged by the commitment from the Chinese government to ensure legal software use. We look forward to continued dialogue between the US and China aimed at addressing issues that affect both economies."
And in Russia, the piracy rate decreased by seven percentage points since 2003, down from 87% in 2003 to 80% in 2006.
In addition, the study indicates that even relatively low piracy rates can amount to huge losses in large markets. For example, while the U.S. had the lowest piracy rate of all countries studied at 21%, it also had the greatest total losses at $7.3 billion. China saw the second highest losses at $5.4 billion with a piracy rate of 82%, followed by France with losses of $2.7 billion and a piracy rate of 45%.
Other key findings:
In more than half of the 102 countries studied, the piracy rate exceeded 60%. In approximately one third of the countries, the piracy rate exceeded 75%.
Emerging markets in Asia/Pacific, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East and Africa accounted for one-third of PC shipments, but only 10% of spending on PC software.
The European Union (EU) and Canada continue to have high losses despite low piracy rates. The EU had losses of $11 billion with a 36% piracy rate, while Canada had losses of $784 million with a 34% piracy rate.
Over the next four years, businesses and consumers worldwide will spend $350 billion on PC software. If current trends continue, the study predicts more than $180 billion worth of PC software will be pirated during that period.
"A number of factors contribute to regional differences in piracy: the strength of intellectual property protection, the availability of pirated software, and cultural differences," said John Gantz, chief research officer at IDC. "Reducing software piracy around the world will take much more work and investment, but those efforts will pay off in the form of stronger local IT industries that drive broader economic growth."
"The critical elements of the global fight against software piracy are education, strong government policy, and enforcement," said Holleyman. "Expanded access to the Internet in emerging markets is making piracy more convenient, which makes it all the more imperative to keep up anti-piracy efforts."
From IDC
Worldwide Software Piracy Rate Holds Steady at 35%, Global Losses Up 15%
15 May 2007
Piracy Rate in China Drops 10% in Three Years
WASHINGTON, D.C., May 15, 2007 — A new study reveals that 35% of the software installed in 2006 on personal computers (PCs) worldwide was obtained illegally, amounting to nearly $40 billion in global losses due to software piracy. Progress was seen in a number of emerging markets, most notably in China, where the piracy rate dropped ten percentage points in three years, and in Russia, where piracy fell seven percentage points over three years.
These are among the findings of the fourth annual global PC software piracy study released today by the Business Software Alliance (BSA), an international association representing the commercial software industry. The study was conducted independently by IDC, the information technology (IT) industry's leading global market research and forecasting firm.
"The good news is we are making progress, however, we still have a lot of work to do to reduce unacceptable levels of piracy," said BSA President and CEO Robert Holleyman. "These significant losses translate into negative impacts on IT industry employment, revenues, and financial resources available for future innovation and the development of new technologies."
Worldwide, for every two dollars of software purchased legitimately, one dollar was obtained illegally. Global losses increased in 2006 by more than $5 billion (15%) over the previous year. Of the 102 countries covered in this year's study, piracy rates dropped moderately in sixty-two countries, while increasing in thirteen.
China's piracy rate dropped four percentage points for the second consecutive year and has dropped ten percentage points in the last three years, from 92% in 2003 to 82% in 2006. By reducing China's piracy rate by ten percentage points over three years, $864 million in losses was saved, according to IDC. The reduction in the piracy rate and the savings are the result of government efforts to increase the use of legitimate software within its own departments, vendor arrangements with PC suppliers to use legitimate software, and increasing industry and government education and enforcement efforts. The legitimate software market in China grew to nearly $1.2 billion in 2006, an increase of 88% over 2005. Since 2003, the legitimate software market in China has grown over 358%.
"Considering the vast PC growth taking place in the Chinese IT market, this continued decline in China's software piracy rate is quite promising," said Holleyman. "BSA is encouraged by the commitment from the Chinese government to ensure legal software use. We look forward to continued dialogue between the US and China aimed at addressing issues that affect both economies."
And in Russia, the piracy rate decreased by seven percentage points since 2003, down from 87% in 2003 to 80% in 2006.
In addition, the study indicates that even relatively low piracy rates can amount to huge losses in large markets. For example, while the U.S. had the lowest piracy rate of all countries studied at 21%, it also had the greatest total losses at $7.3 billion. China saw the second highest losses at $5.4 billion with a piracy rate of 82%, followed by France with losses of $2.7 billion and a piracy rate of 45%.
Other key findings:
In more than half of the 102 countries studied, the piracy rate exceeded 60%. In approximately one third of the countries, the piracy rate exceeded 75%.
Emerging markets in Asia/Pacific, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East and Africa accounted for one-third of PC shipments, but only 10% of spending on PC software.
The European Union (EU) and Canada continue to have high losses despite low piracy rates. The EU had losses of $11 billion with a 36% piracy rate, while Canada had losses of $784 million with a 34% piracy rate.
Over the next four years, businesses and consumers worldwide will spend $350 billion on PC software. If current trends continue, the study predicts more than $180 billion worth of PC software will be pirated during that period.
"A number of factors contribute to regional differences in piracy: the strength of intellectual property protection, the availability of pirated software, and cultural differences," said John Gantz, chief research officer at IDC. "Reducing software piracy around the world will take much more work and investment, but those efforts will pay off in the form of stronger local IT industries that drive broader economic growth."
"The critical elements of the global fight against software piracy are education, strong government policy, and enforcement," said Holleyman. "Expanded access to the Internet in emerging markets is making piracy more convenient, which makes it all the more imperative to keep up anti-piracy efforts."
Saturday, May 5, 2007
I saw my first Mac!
Well, after having worked in IT for some 25 years, I finally broke down and went to see what a Macintosh computer looked like. What I like about it is that it runs on top of a variant of a Unix-based OS. What I don't like about it is its UI. I know that is one of the selling features of the Mac. I just didn't care for how on its current OS version all of the icons are on the bottom and if you cursor over them they expand in size and kind of pop out at you. Personally, I just find this disorienting. Just like I also detest flashing HTML. What I like about it is that hackers write viruses for Windows since Mac is only about 5.8 percent of the personal computer market. Many people don't have load anti-virus software on their Mac. This is from a report from Macworld, "According to IDC’s report, the growth puts Apple’s market share at 5.8 percent (fourth place overall), ahead of Toshiba at 4.2 percent. Dell topped the U.S. market with 31 percent, but suffered a negative growth rate of -6.7 percent. The top 5 is rounded out by HP with a 22 percent share and Gateway with a 6 percent share." HP is currently the dominant pc maker. I am writing on a HP right now.
a SOA class at IBM
I attended a free 3-day class (free for IBM partners) titled “Designing SOA Solutions with the IBM Foundation” from April 30 to May 2, 2007. I found the class very useful. Although the class somewhat deviated from the planned agenda, I found the dialog quite intriguing. All of the participants had SOA experience and knowledge and came with plenty of questions and offered valuable feedback and real life experiences. Incidentally, out of 10 people, I was the only female (typical) and only one of two Americans. The other American was also from my company. I was able to get a quick glance at some of the framework provided within IBM’s rather closely guarded and propreitary closed Service-Oriented Modeling and Architecture (SOMA) methodology. SOMA is IBM’s approach to service modeling, service design and service deployment. SOMA covers a broad scope and implements service-oriented analysis and design (SOAD) through the identification, specification and realization of services, components that realize those services (a.k.a. "service components"), and the flows that can be used to compose services. A description of SOMA is available in the article "Service-oriented Modeling and Architecture: How to Identify, Specify and Realize Services". SOMA includes an analysis and design method that extends traditional object-oriented and component-based analysis and design methods to include concerns relevant to and supporting SOA. IBM has integrated SOMA with its RUP methodology and its tools, particularly the Websphere line of products.
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