Art of Alignment
think • orient • align ……. (We are undergoing upgrades & site migration)SOA, BPM & Governance: Packaged & Productized?
I’ve noticed a trend towards “XYZ affiliated / branded SOA roles/ people & products”.
Every day I receive e-mails for or see notifications for companies looking for some of the following roles:
- Java SOA Architect / SOA Java Architect
- SOA Architect - IBM Websphere Stack
- SOA Architect – TIBCO know-how a must
- .NET Architect – SOA
- BAM Manager / Architect
- etc..
Why is it that; when platform & technology independent enterprise integration, orientation & alignment was the ‘mantra’ for SOA that these organziations still seek ‘deep technology-silo specialists’ versus ‘broad SOA purists’.
I don’t know. Go ask the Product Vendors & their Sales Directors / Professionals, the Marketing Buzz Boys and “Affiliated” Technologists.
What qualifies a ‘Technology Architect’ to become an ‘SOA Architect’? I dont know, but it seems to me that the ability to implement ‘web services’ (from a handful to a couple of 100 / 1000) using a ‘Message & Process oriented Web Services Integration Middleware Platform’ qualifies them. I beg to differ.
In fact, an ‘SOA Architect’ strives to bring a sense of ‘quality & sanity check’ in all the technology that is being used to build & support the enterprise processes. He strives to bring about and remove the notion of functional silos and / or Business v/s IT siloes / camps in an organization. He strives to bring about a governance model that eliminates and converts ‘boundary lines of separation’ and converts them to ‘points of empathy & collaboration’. People delve equally into their own responsibilities as they do into helping others fulfill theirs. An SOA Architect has no affinities & affiliations.
That does not mean that a Java Architect or an SAP Platform expert cannot learn & apply the Service Orientation mindset. But, it comes from understanding the nature of things beyond the platform, the nature of the ‘Domino Effect’, in an Enterprise and its related industries & markets. Go beyond the product & beyond the past techniques for your technology & business and start fresh. Can you think outside the Box?
If pure ‘Service Orientation’ was to be truely understood, it implies a clear lack of affinity & focuses on the simple goal of ‘Strategic Orientation & Alignment’ and leverages the abilities of SMEs in bringing that alignment. Service Orientation revolves around abstracted non-affiliated Reference Models & Architectures that bring to light Cabablity & Methodology Maturity benchmarks that the enterprise continually strives to align with and live upto.
So neither SOA-ized product stacks, nor SOA-ized platform experts by themselves really qualify in bringing about Service Orientation.
BPM – SOA: Is there a Gap? Beyond the 3 letters..
As I am seeing lately, for most people…
SOA – lives in the Technology & related Services world
BPM – lives in the Business & related Process world
Why is it that when SOA / BPM were meant to bring about better alignment between Business & Technology, that exactly the opposite is being done?
In essence, Service Orientation & Process Orientation end up being one & the same thing.
Processes / Sub-Processes & Services / Composite Services are pretty much subsets, supersets & equal sets of each other depending purely on the viewpoint & the scope.
So, why all this brouhaha around SOA v/s BPM. Technology teams doing their own SOA initiatives & Business / Process folks doing their BPM initiatives. They want to work in their own worlds like they did before. It is surprising as well as shocking that the Goal of Alignment & Agility is really overshadowed by this bifurcation.
This confusion is because there is no clear understanding between what is a Service & a Process, how they overlap & how they inter-relate.
A Service is nothing but a process(s) & its information exposed in a specified manner.
For all practical purposes processes & services are pretty much the same thing, differing only in terms of viewpoint; for a service its usually from the point of a consumer.
A process is a means to service a given end.
So, what do we need to do about these SOA & BPM wars, and related initiatives.
One word that starts with ‘A’ – ALIGNMENT.
There is no GAP that needs to be bridged between SOA & BPM… unless one is created.
Now, if there exists an artificial gap between the two initiatives, it is one of perspective.
All Processes & Services do nothing but read & write information between People & Machines.
The manner in which a process services the information between the right people & the right machines as per its goal defined the life, scope & behavior of that process / service.
So, how do we bring Alignment?
Demystification: BPM – What is your process? Why BPM? Virtualizing your processes..
Business Process Management (BPM) has become the next big thing in 3-letter acronyms since the S-O-A boom. It’s the lure & magic of ‘Managed Processes’ that beckons everyone to go and implement BPM / BPMS. It is suppossed to give you some ‘control’ & ‘view’ of processes that did not exist before. Can it really do that?
It all depends on how you go about doing it. But, at the same time you understand what kind maturity is incorporated into your managed processes when you architect, design & implement BPM Systems (BPMS). Knowing what you want to be able to get out of your processes and then learning what you did not know about what “more” you can get out of your processes.
So, what is BPM?
In simple words, BPM is taking a process, its scope, its touch points and mapping them out such that the flow of that process is manageable and visible.
The manageability & visibility aspects can be at various levels in terms of how mature the capabilities of the underlying BPMS as well as how well the attributes are modeled and realized.
As maturity improves, all possible elements & attributes of that process are “realized & manifested” from the real / physical world into a “virtual” system. This “virtualization” of the process & its attributes is the final level of Business Process Management.
What is the motivation behind such levels of BPM?
- Discovering Hidden Cost centers
- Utilizing & managing Cost associated with Common Services & Major Processes
- More accurate & improved chargeback for Accountability
- Enhanced Compliance
- SOX compliance for governmental & regulations thus preventing legal implications for the C-Levels & Executive Management
Imagine, if Enron had a Business Compliance framework that used Business Service Portfolio management built on top of an SOA. Its quite possible that these things would have caused red flags sooner.
Since, Management, Visibility & Compliance are key we have look at the various types / levels that it can take.
- Strategic
- Process
- Legal
- Business Policy
- Cost
- Spend
- Audits
- Anomalies
- Fraud etc..
Enterprise Evolution – Change & Agility: Managing the Reality of the Domino Effect – Part 1
Enterprise changes happen due to a lot of external & internal factors.
Each of these changes spread through the enterprise as a Domino Effect and cause a certain amount of disruption; Processes change & breakdown, Data models become corrupted or incapable, downstream functionality gets stalled & even more importantly core business processes & compliance needs cannot be fulfilled. I shall cite some genericized & abstracted examples from my experiences in the last decade or so.
A retailer with half a million products in its rapidly changing product hierarchy, product tagging & supplier identification (SKUs) environments has an array of processes that may or may not be able to handle such changes & sustain Data Models that enable a lot of their processes to work. Their focus being primarily sales / revenue driven and secondarily operational improvement & innovation, BI becomes the ‘starting’ initiative but not very well designed or sustainable, given the nature of their business environment; processes & data always in flux.
A high-tech manufacturer with several BUs, varying product & hierarchy lines, that share components & parts, have independent but related & compatible offerings, various diverse supply & sales channels, use global - sourcing > manufacturing > assembly > delivery models, have geo-culturally diverse markets & customized offerings (North America, Latin America, EMEA, AsiaPacific) and competes in a very ‘dynamic pricing’ based sensitive environment has a whole plethora of disruptive Domino Effects.. in action.
A telecom services provider having undergone major Mergers & Acquisitions, Bankruptcies, re-orgs, market & technology evolutions, having a strict deadline to meet ‘compliance’ needs for a Federal Program that promises chunks of the world’s largest double digit multi-billion dollar telecom services contract that will become the primary source of revenue for a larger part of the coming decade. The plethora of internal technologies, groups & organizations, multiple consulting vendors and neglected elements in the formulated roadmap causing missed enterprise milestones & unaddressed gaps.
A financial services major with a large variety of businesses; each buying, selling & running financial assets in various markets, with diverse forms of risk, liabilities, underwriting, ratings and what not. Their financial assets & product offerings keep changing and so do the underlying legalities & compliance as well as safeguards. Their ability to bring on, grow & maintain knowledgeable talent is limited and their goals place more work on those shoulders with additional pressure towards shorter time to markets.
A healthcare outfit.. (more to come)
An insurance services major.. (more to come)
The key is in observing the ‘nature of change’ and ‘designing for change’. Building into the Enterprise a ‘culture of change’ and integrating into the Enterprise DNA that ‘change sustainability’ gene. This DNA is to be composed of various “business change patterns” observed & envisaged (past, present & future) in various parts of the enterprise in every area & at every level & in the right granularity.
The Business Change Patterns (BCPs) are usually ‘known’ to most Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) in the enterprise in a specific area. The issue is that, this ‘knowledge’ is something that resides in their heads and may never get realized & really utilized into the Enterprise other than some documents, presentations, discussions or limited black-box configurations. The knowledge of the summarized Domino Effect of several BCPs is very important to Incorporate, Virtualize & Manifest (IV&M) in an Enterprise for successful & sustainable enterprise evolution.
Incorporate – Selection of parameters…
Virtualize – Modeling of parameters…
Manifest – Realization & usage of parameters.. into & as meta-data
So far, the IT / technology world have been active adopters of ‘Modeling’ techniques all the way from Design to Execution. On the other hand, it has been much more difficult and complicated to model business behaviors; largely because they are more complicated & less predictable. Imagine, being able to model a real life process that exisits in the physical world and represent, execute and observe it in the virtual world.
To cite a simple example let’s take a simplistic “procure, manufacture, store, distribute & sell” value chain. In a simplistic sense you would sell at prices determined by the cost price & the manufacturing price & maybe adding an aggregate value to storage & distribution costs. Now, what if you could actually model properties & attributes to every step of the processes in the value chain and see exactly how each cost varies for different products & under different business conditions. This would take the observation of the processes from a more abstract viewpoint to a more ‘accurate’ one by taking into consideration the true ‘change factors’.
It was very difficult to and at times next to impossible to incorporate such factors and account for them. That needs to change for the business & process world.
A couple of examples..
Service Orientation in Retrospect…
Even though there is such a hype & hoopla around SOA and every products & services vendor out there is preaching SOA, what I am finding is that it is in fact a very small world. Between a couple of people I know in this space it seems like we are able to pretty much map out the people, the organizations & jobs, the chances, the opportunities, the successes & failures the SO players have had. Every once in a while I catch up with some people and discover that we have similar observations on this space about people & organizations, their thought processes and the direction in which they are going.. largely misled:
- Category 1: SOA is such an Industry/Market Buzzword – We have to SO’A'ize.
The blind need for every vendor to go SOA reflects the lack of clear knowledge. - Category 2: SOA = EAI. Its just a new marketing buzzword for EAI. We’ve had COBRA (CORBA he he) and yada yada for a long time now. Its just a new market buzzword.
If SOA and EAI were the same thing I think someone would’ve called it out. There are subsets of similarity in goals that are being tried to achieve, but it would be more accurate to say EAI is / was a subset of what SOA should be. - Category 3: SOA = WebServices. Web Services X & Web Services Y. Publish-Subscribe-Discover. We are done.
If it was that simple then every restaurant in the world would have had the same kind of customer service and client experience. There are more dynamics involved here than this simplistic viewpoint. - Category 4: SOA = BPEL BPEL BPEL – Let’s do BPEL in our IT organization. We are not cool if I dont do BPEL.
Do I need to say anymore? - Category 5: SOA = We have this Multi-Million / Multi-Billion Dollar ERP system which was suppossed to solve all our problems. It never did that / It is doing what we need it do. Why should we believe that you have something to offer ? ERP vs SOA?
Your ERP provides a set of functional business services, probably in conjunction with some of your custom applications. The orientation & alignment of these for maximum value is what Service Orientation brings to the table. - Category 6: SOA = Unnecessary levels of abstraction & virtualization => Executional Overhead => Why do it at all?
People dont understand the underlying reasons & benefits of virtualization. What can be leveraged? Who are the benefactors & what kind of benefits can they derive? - Category 7: Our SOA products / product suite can solve all your problems.
Now, how many times have you had a product vendor tell you that and then reality hits base when the rubber hits the road. The products have improved, and technologies have matured, but its still just a set of tools. If you wanted to build a house would you go to Black & Dekker or seek out the best Architects, Designers, Planners and Engineers & Managers to make it happen. Case in point. - Category 8: Our IT organization / Enterprise Architects / System Architects are responsible for it & will drive SOA. – An SO initiative should not only involve but should “start” with the Business. It needs to start with the Business People; who justify & hold the purse strings, who the IT Management & IT people connect with at every level.
- - Category 9: SOA = Fixing our IT & solving all those bridge issues. – Yes & No.
If there is no specific outcome or set of outcomes that your organization (Business Value Outcome) have in mind then it will probably be a pointless venture. Service ‘Orientation’ – What are you trying to orient towards today? - Category 10: SOA = We dont need SOA. We need to solve our Data Quality / Master Data Management (MDM) / Business Intelligence / Data or Business Warehousing issues.
A large majority of Data related issues arise from the silos in the organization (Business Silos as well as IT silos). Silos are the reality of an organization. They have been part of the human evolution for ages..and they will not go away.
What do you need to do?
Determine how silos influence each other, the overall structure / organization & the other way around. These influences are not limited to Data alone. Data is nothing but water in lots of buckets that gets passed around between people and/via technology / manually (active & passive modes). Those influences are cross ‘system’ & involved a lot of things.. Process, People, Technology..
The key to solving your Data problems lies in your Processes & vice versa. - Category 11: SOA = I have all these consultants in here, I have all these SOA enabled middleware tools & products, we have been service orienting for 12/18 months now and we are just not happy. How do I get all of this to work for me? I dont want your high level strategy / roadmap that you give all your clients that end up as a bunch of documents that have no tangible impact. I want something that will have an impact on how I get these things done.
These are the frustrations I get from the early adopters who were sold on SOA by a products vendor, IT bigwigs, Service Major (Think the Big5).
I have 2 words: “Business Architecture” & “Business Governance”. Everyone is talking about it now, but they dont really understand what kind of ‘change vehicles’ are needed here. - Category 12: BPM = I have to make all my processes kosher. I need to document and map each and everyone of them from start to finish in an “as is” state as well as “to be” state. I want to manage all my processes.
The reality is processes are usually not well defined. Even after they are designed and defined there are micro-processes internal to them that act as constraints, essentially changing the ‘ideal’ view of that process towards a more ‘real’ view. These micro-process constraints are usually undocumented & neglected as a part of ‘major business processes’. Even though they are part of the core business processes, they have very low visibility in terms of the tangible business function, vocabulary & semantics.
When the time comes to realize these processes, these constraints bring a less than real picture of BPM. - Category 13: Executives are afraid of asking difficult questions. Dont’ give me the grand future vision. Let’s just document these things, get the tools and move forward.
This is usually, when executives take the naive route and are going through the “first round” of their SOA / BPM initiative.
Because, they did not pause to ask the difficult questions & neglected issues that could become stumbling blocks later on, they are digging themselves into a hole.
It is when they have been through 1st & 2nd rounds of these initiatives & not achieved any tangible results that have a ‘real’ impact on their organization, that they start asking the difficult questions. At that time, they are extremely defensive, untrusting & will be the devils advocate to the n’th degree.
I’d say, if they had asked their in house experts & consultants some of these questions earlier on, a lot of things would get addressed & better trust factors would’ve been built.
Sustainability – The underpinning of any Enterprise Change Mechanism – SOA included
I see a large number of Enterprises go through some of the following scenarios:
- Hire management consulting firms (like McKinsey, BCG, Bain etc.) to help them resolve issues taking into account the following areas: Strategic, Operational, Organizational, Financial & External / Market to derive the maximum value for the Enterprise.
- These Strategic Management Consulting firms take into consideration information about all these factors from the approximated past, the assumed present & projected future and beltout strategies & roadmaps.
- If they are involved further, they will outline an execution / operational roadmap. Rarely, do they stay back and help them execute & deliver.
- To add to that, these strategies & their initiatives do not have any ‘deviation’ or ‘exception management’ fallbacks. What if you find that the outcome of a certain strategic initiative is not going in a direction as it was expected? How can you proactively take measures to
- Understand that deviation
- Organize a Plan B
- Execute a Plan B
- Observe the impact of Plan B
- Sustain plan B or Re-iterate and formulate plan B1, B2.. etc.
- What is the Market responsiveness and what is the Change & Sustain model for the enterprise?
- Invest into Data Consolidation / Master Data Management (MDM) initiatives for one or the other purpose. Data Quality issues, Business Intelligence
- …
- Take up and mammoth SOA /ERP-SOA initiatives (IBM, SeeBeyond, TIBCO SOA Stacks, SAP Netweaver E-SOA, Oracle Fusion etc & XYZ SOA Venders)..
Breaking down Silos: What was the point?
I see enterprises going through the following kinds of initiatives…
- SOA initiatives
- BPM Initiatives
- MDM Initiatives
- Process Re-engineering Initiatives
- Consolidation Initiatives
- Legacy Modernization Initiatives
- Service Enablement Initiatives
- B2B Initiatives
- Single Source of Truth
- Business Intelligence
- Data Warehousing
- Single Sign on Do-it-all “My…” Portals
- IT Strategy & Roadmaps
- IT Portfolio Management
- etc.. etc..
All of these so called initiatives have one of the following things in mind:
- Improve the enterprise
- Make it work better & deliver to customers
- Simplicity, Manageabilty & Flexibility
A lot of these initiatives are being taken Enterprise wide, which is a good thing. The talk of “horizontal end to end integration” & “breaking down siloes” is rampant but did anyone stop to see if they were commiting the same mistakes over again?
A lot of ‘breaking down the Siloes’ is now happening between the “business function” boundary lines. Procurement – Manufacturing – SupplyChain – Storage & Distributon are getting better end to end integration, at most times though.
Did they stop to ask “Why are all of my initiatives for improving my organization, running un-aligned?”
I know of so many organizations who have SOA, BPM, MDM, BI and other initiatives all doing enterprise-wide work unaligned.
They are once again working in ‘Siloes’ of another kind. Go figure! I was most surprised when I found some organizations with very different SOA & BPM initiatives with separate CoEs. Adding to it, a lot of Product vendors supported that.
To me its all one big thing. SOA BPM pretty much go hand in hand and so does everything else.
i.e. How an enterprise designs & articulates its “business services” are a function of the “service expectation” of the customer, how those expectations are “serviced” by the proceses of that enterprise which in turn execute on the shoulders of people, data & technology.
For instance, How a service is named, classified and designed is heavily influenced by the design, scope & lifecycle of the processes & data involved. They are all related entities. In essence, a seprate MDM initiative without taking into account Processes, or a BPM initiative without taking into account ‘Data Issues’, or an SOA initiative without taking into account BPM & MDM issues are all headed for trouble.
If you do not have all your initiatives “very closely” aligned then you are again working in Siloes. We all know what happens then. FINGER POINTING GAMES!
Who is to blame?
We are. People. People have ‘ownership’ issues; this is mine & that is yours mentality. The same nature of ‘my competency’ and ‘your competency’ exists not only within enterprises but also inside consulting firms that advise & service these companies. How many consulting firms with various practice areas have unified operating models?
The sooner & more closely these initiatives all get aligned the better it is.
Who can make it happen?
The key leadership team. They have to wake up and realize that for an Enterprise to work like a well-oiled & aligned automobile, things need to be better aligned. It has to come all the way down from the CXO level and penetrate through to the bottom, more significantly upto the major facilitators, directors & managers of these initiatives.
What do you need?
Service Orientation & Alignment ‘Generalists’. These are people who understand and can understand, speak & help align cross-competency initiatives. They can find the association points & create clear hand-off paths between them.
These are people who understand anything & everything from issues & abilities with Core Integration Technologies & Middleware, Business Process & Management, Data Architecture & Translation, Analytics, Intelligence & Presentation Frameworks, Functional Enterprise Value Chains, Organizational Siloes – (Political, Technical, Business) and can be “conduits” for facilitating communication & collaboration indirectly & resolving issues in tense scenarios.
They are empowered as well as aware of what the execs & CXOs want happening inside the enterprise. They are free from chains of command and can be “sentinels” that channel critical information straight to the top or appropriate levels before major issues arise. They are like the “Gistapo” in the German Forces, but ofcourse they are to be loved and not feared like the Gistapo. So, instead of taking things to the top they need to help people align when they see these issues.
I will attempt to outline more clearly what possibly consitutes the attributes of a key SOA Architect / Evangelist / Manager / Director & their teams….
Everything else: SOA products, BPM products are nothing but tools of the trade. These are only secondary to having a sustainable “Strategically Oriented & Aligned” Enterprise (SOE).
Demystification: S O A – 3 letters that mean so many different things..
This series of posts will be dedicated to “Demystification” to address the lack of clarity in this space & how various vendors & organizations are conf-using 3 letter acronyms.
So, I notice that a lot of these 3 letter acronyms (well even some 4 letter words.. no no.. not curse words.. some of those too.. But, that’s a conversation for a happy hour) are being thrown around as Magic Pills. Enterprises are sold on them and do not really have a clear bearing on them. A large part of the credit for this goes to the so called ‘market leaders’ in the space. Note, I mentioned ‘market leaders’ and not ‘thought leaders’. The market leaders are the ones who know how to create hype & hoopla and catch the ‘unaware’ and put them on a ride on the rapids in a raft.. put a bunch of ‘consultants’ on the raft who dont really understand it and start billing the client for every rock & rapid they pass through, no matter how unpleasant the ride & ofcourse, the fact that there is no resulting outcome & navigation around where this “should” go.
Taking SOA and starting the demystification process.
SOA – Service Oriented Architecture(s) – as it is popularly known. Everyone is SOA-izing, everything from ERP to Development tools, from Business & Technology Integration to Data & Firewall appliances to even some networking devices.
It’s not a bad trend but to what end?
The most prominent SOA definitions I see in the market (1, 2, 3, 4, ) revolve around something to the tune of…
“A mature technology integration architecture that evolves beyond and supercedes the Enterprise Integration space (EAI, EII, TI, Middleware) “
Is that true? To some extent.. that this is only a part of the Service Orientation (SO) process in an Enterprise. By itself, it does not good since the same traditional issues still arise.
What it does add is the fact that the next generation of Technology Architecture & Standards Stack is better designed to be “moulded” for Enterprise Changes. But, again its only the clay and a large part of the moulding has to be done, correctly.
So, what is SOA?
Let’s look at some of the Myths & Half-truths around SO.
Myths, Misconceptions & Half-truths. (color coded).
- SOA = Web Services. Wrong!
- SOA = The new EAI, EII
- SOA = Service Call equivalent of RPC / Publish & Subscribe
- SOA = An enabling technology architecture; The use of standards based protocols for integration & messaging; largely web services
- SOA = ESB; Wrong! You can’t get SOA in a box.
- SOA Product Vendors & their promises: What they tell you and What they don’t.
- SOA = Agility, Flexibility, Visibility, Adaptability
- SOA = Makes everything easy, The holy grail, The final destination, Nirvana. It’s a Gray Area
I guess now the critical question is.. What is Service Orientation (SO)?
SO – is an Orientation process, a Change Vehicle for the Enterprise Business Architecture (not to be confused with only the technology architecture or the Process Architecture.. it composes anything & everything about the Enterprise), and in some senses it is ‘Mutant DNA introduced into an Enterprise that allows it to change shape and form rapidly in response to its environment’
We will take a couple of different cracks at ‘SOA’
‘Services Orientation Architecture’ – Orientation of all the services of an Enterprise internally & externally to better meet strategic goals.
‘Service Oriented Architecture’ – Servicing the customer, the entire value chain
‘Services Orientation & Alignment’ – It is about how the enterprise services its customers and markets and how those services are aligned for maximum value
This is what I really think defines SOA.
Finally, the 2 definitions that make it simple & clear..
Business
A business architecture that orients itself i.e. its processes & services, for optimal strategic execution to better service the enterprise value chain
Technical
An architecture capable of delivering processes, services & information visibility in a fast, flexible and adaptive manner bringing closer “strategic & tactical” alignment of processes executed with the support of a variety of existing/ available resources (i.e. people, data, business, technology)
There you have it.. SOA de-mystified… albeit at a Higher level. There is more to come. The Demystification begins..
‘Service Orientation’ – Influences from the realm of the spiritual and the metaphysical
I was just starting to read a book gifted by my Grandfather (S.S. Sanwal), titled "The Dynamo of Prayer" by A. Graham Ikin.
Side Note:
It took me more than a couple of searches through Google to even find a referential link to this book's author and not even the book itself. Wow, was it that rare? The closest thing I could come up with were these links 1, 2 (if link 2 breaks use Ikin to search by author) relating to out of publish books.I was unable to find an ISBN number on the book or anywhere else online. So this is what it says about how and where it was published.
FIRST PUBLISHED BY ARCO PUBLICATIONS 1960
(C) A. GRAHAM IKIN 1960
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
CLARKE, DOBLE AND BRENDON LTD
CATTEDOWN, PLYMOUTH
My several attempts to read it late evenings after a long day would be slightly hampered by the following :
- My inherently tired eyes and brains; from chewing through all the 20-30 or so windows of continual information stimuli that screamed out from my laptop at any given time
- Very strong language that would twist and turn into long sentences where one would lose track of the start of the sentence by the time you are trying to absorb the end, or ofcourse I had low attention span and focus that late at night.
Ofcourse, last night I was able to go through around 25 pages before my eyes began to shut. One bit caught my attention since I had to look up a few words to ensure that I was absorbing the matter in the same vein as the author wanted it to be absorbed.
"Nature and Grace are very closely intertwined. God is Immanent as well as Transcendent"
Side Note:
I had to look up the words online since I was missing my Webster Unabridged CD.
I started to piece that together after looking up the 'reference sources' to see whether I had the same interpretation…
Around 10 minutes later, it hit me (the ways of the subconcious mind). How the same concept relates to 'Service Orientation' in terms of an Enterprise or in terms of a style of Architecture.
To be continued…
“The important thing is not to stop questioning” – Albert Einstein. So, why do you want a SOA & What’s the motive behind having one?
“The important thing is not to stop questioning” – Albert Einstein. So… why do you want an SOA & what is its purpose?
To answer that, let’s go back to the basics. Let’s outline the biggest ‘charms’ of the SOA:
1. Adaptive / Agile Enterprise – The ability to change
It is the ability of an enterprise to “change”. Why is the ability to change that important? Because, it is not an option. Change is good, change is inevitable, change is now and forever, change is every instant that passes by.
Side Note:
Business gurus have talked about “change” for a long time, especially on Harvard Business Review (HBR). My introduction to “change” on the HBR via the following articles had taken the formal shape of an ingrained mental anchor (Why Good Companies Go Bad, Why Do Employees Resist Change?). I am glad I took that ‘Engineering Management’ class.
What does it mean when we talk about the ‘adaptive’ enterprise? Let’s look at an enterprise as a ‘system’ in its entirety. Also, this system is composed of several interacting sub-systems that ‘influence’ each other. These sub-systems can primarily be ‘classified’ into these broad categories :
- People Systems
- Information Systems
- Business Systems
- Physical Systems
- Process Systems
- Cross System Interfaces (or Cross System Association Points)
(For the business people.. I would term this is ‘Cross System Association Points’, since ‘interface’ has become so much of an IT term that it might be misleading in this context.)
- A real SOA would allow all of the above systems to “change” and “adapt” quickly, in an organized, controlled and measured fashion with respect to all ‘association points’, whether or not the change was internal to that category of the sub-system or another category via a cross system interface.
- At the same time the processes that make these changes these changes happen need to be managed as well.
What I have observed is that, so far the focus has been on attempts to ‘push’ the envelope around making Business Systems and Information Sytems adapt and comply with under the control of ‘a small set of people’ who “define” and “beltout” ‘processes’. (i.e. BPM, Process Orchestration / Process Choreography, Compositing Services etc.)
Quite brilliant, but I think that, this is a very unidirectional approach to the “whole” system. If people have the ability to influence Business and IT Systems (taken as a set of paths of influence), there need to be other paths of stimuli that influence ‘other categories’ of systems to bring about a cohesive and holistic view.
These paths “need” to be incorporated into the “whole” system. The question is.. How? and Why? What are these paths of influence going to be?
Lets approach the “why” first. The following side note outlines the reason behind the importance of the precedence on “why” versus the “how“.
Side Note:
My grandfather’s (Mr. S.S. Sanwal) brother (Mr. H.S. Sanwal, also grandpa) says“There was a time when parents would direct and children would obey. That was the culture. Times have changed. Now, with your current generation (he talks about us..) its not a matter of ‘how?‘, but a matter of ‘why?‘. If you can convince them ‘why?‘, the ‘how?‘, is pretty much take care of by them.”
When this comes from someone who has
- held positions of a President, VP, Chairman and Director (prior to retiring), at enterprises in the manufacturing space (Paper, Rubber, Plastics, Cement, Chemicals, Optic Fibre industries)
- understood people at their core (from Management to Labor in an enterprise or from little children to elders in a large joint family)
…it makes complete sense that people are the binding element no matter where you go. Hence, the “why” factor is important for today’s generation in every aspect of life.
This is why I believe in the “why” factor.
Why?
Why do we need these paths of inter-subsystem influence?
Any and every system works on a simple and basic princple of ‘Cause’ and ‘Effect’. In systems engineering and electrical systems when you model ‘influences’ on a system (internal and/or external) it is very important to determine, understand and balance these influences so that the system can be designed to achieve a steady state or reach a certain composite steady state (that consists of a set of controlled and easily manageable steady states) under the course of these influences. To achieve such state(s) the paths of influence that exist can not be ignored.
This is what actually happens in an Enterprise. But, it is not feasible to determine or utilize all these paths of influence. The goal should be to minimize this effect by incorporating as many ‘significant’ paths as possible.
When a system incorporates positive or negative feedback, it is an example of a path of influence.
How?
How do we devise, design, implement, achieve and further prune these paths of inter-subsystem influence?
That would be an interesting exercise… an exercise that I am currently going through… Once again, I shall leave this for another post when I have more time to dwell on it, since this post has been in ‘draft’ mode for almost 2 months for the lack of this little section.
2. Transparent Enterprise / Total Business Visibility – The ability to not just see clearly, but “know“
An Enterprise contains a mesh of many tapped and untapped, cleansed and raw pieces of information. Having visibility into the right kind of information, presented in the right way, at the right time can be critical to decisions. But, this information is usually distributed, inaccessible or not conveniently available to the right people, at the right time.
How can we define ‘Total Business Visibility’ (TBV)?
TBV means, ‘perspectives’ that are not normally visible are enabled. It allows a given individual or set of individuals to have better information to make better decisions. It allows an enterprise and all its pieces to work with better alignment due to the increased visibility into the operations, processes and activities of the enterprise.
Total Business Visibility means real-time visibility into what is happening at any given time. It allows sales teams, finance folks, HR, Technologists and Managers to see information clearly.
To understand what information needs to be made visible to individuals in an Enterprise we will have to look into ‘Perspective Management’.
During some discussions a few months back (exact date is logged… will need to look it up), I coined the phrase ‘perspective matching’. I have searched quite a bit on the internet and have yet to find anyone claiming the phrase. So, from this point on I shall claim rights, copyrights and trademark rights to the following phrases.
“Perspective Matching”
“Matching Perspectives”
(unless ofcourse someone else had already done so and can prove that to me in writing).
Copyright 2005 – Abhishek Sanwal, Trademark (in the registration process).
PS: My next post which has also been in draft for quite a while shall be on ‘Perspective Matching’ and ‘Enterprise Perspectives’.
