Michael and Rob, Of course IT is part of the business, and IT culture is part of corporate culture, and it all has to change. But it is also necessary to focus the change on IT since that's where SOA is meaningful. I think we are all saying the same thing, and it is (as Rob actually said in one of his emails) a false dichotomy to separate IT and corporate culture. But because SOA is something carried out in IT or by IT, we focus the culture change on that since that is where the organizational changes have the greatest impact. I think it is just emphasis, not disagreement. Two books that describe the Credit Suisse SOA are Eric Newcomer and Greg Lomow, Understanding SOA with Web Services Dirk Krafzig, Karl Banke, Dirk Slama, Enterprise SOA, Service-Oriented Architecture Best Practices
The second one contains an entire chapter on the Credit Suisse SOA, including exhaustive information on the approach, design, and implementation. The book I wrote with Greg uses Credit Suisse more as an example to illustrate the features and functions of an SOA platform (and the book is focused on showing how Web services do and don't provide those). I am not sure which other SOA books include references to the Credit Suisse SOA, but I would bet some others do. The Credit Suisse SOA is in some respects the source of much of the industry's knowledge about SOA. Eric ----- Original Message ---- From: Michael Poulin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, July 3, 2008 12:51:04 PM Subject: Re: [service-orientated-architecture] Re: Meehan & Anne on SOA Success - or lack of I would add, the change has to be in the business, business-IT culture, and then in the IT culture. I believe, SOA is not for IT, it is, first of all, for business and then for IT (thought it was originated in IT and IT has to have a credit for this). Eric, could you, please, refer the books mentioned in "Greg Lomow and I and other authors have documented it in books. "? - Michael ----- Original Message ---- From: Eric Newcomer <[EMAIL PROTECTED] com> To: service-orientated- architecture@ yahoogroups. com Sent: Thursday, July 3, 2008 4:30:25 PM Subject: Re: [service-orientated -architecture] Re: Meehan & Anne on SOA Success - or lack of I would agree with this. This is consistent with what our customers tell us, some of whom have been doing successful SOA projects for 8-9 years. They say the biggest challenge is cultural - meaning the change necessary to IT culture. One interesting aspect to me personally is related to the example we always talk about - Credit Suisse in Zurich. They have the largest SOA deployment in financial services, and have created an extensive internal governance model - much more complex than any of the reg/rep tools can handle in fact. What stuck me recently was reading about Toyota and their lean manufacturing process. The article mentioned how well documented the Toyota process is, yet how hard it has been for their competitors to match it. The article implied the Toyota folks knew exactly how hard it would be for another company to institute the necessary discipline to match what they have done. I think the same is true for SOA. From the beginning, Credit Suisse has been very open about their SOA. To this day they attend conferences regularly and describe in detail what they've done, and how they've done it. Gartner has written several reports based on the Credit Suisse SOA. Greg Lomow and I and other authors have documented it in books. Yet despite the fact that successes are known and well documented, many companies have a real challenge transforming their IT cultures in order to obtain the benefits of SOA. I agree it's not a technology challenge - at least not primarily. Eric ----- Original Message ---- From: Anne Thomas Manes <[EMAIL PROTECTED] com> To: service-orientated- architecture@ yahoogroups. com Sent: Thursday, July 3, 2008 10:35:58 AM Subject: Re: [service-orientated -architecture] Re: Meehan & Anne on SOA Success - or lack of I differentiate "SOA project" from "SOA initiative". A project refers to the development of a specific set of services to address the needs of a single application or integration project. The initiative refers to the strategic effort to rearchitect the application portfolio to achieve a set of broad business goals, e.g., increase agility, reduce IT budgets, improve data quality, optimize business processes, etc. All but one of the companies we interviewed had deployed successful SOA projects, i.e., the project met its objectives to deliver a working solution. In many circumstances, the services were used for one application, and it's very unlikely that they would ever be reused. I refer to these as "one-off services". I did find a few examples of projects that delivered reusable services. One of my favorite stories comes from a large investment bank. They have three very successful shared services -- all are data services. One accesses HR information. One accesses reference data. The third provides access to data from the mainframe. They also have tons of applications that use one-off services. But the SOA initiative at this company has completely stalled.The EA team responsible for SOA has gone on to other things. For the most part, I let the interviewees tell me whether their initiatives were "successful" or not. We started our interviews by asking how the initiative was going. Our approach was to ask open-ended questions and just let them talk. Most of our interviewees responding by recounting how much trouble they were having getting the business folks to get engaged. They had pretty much taken the initiative as far as they could from a technical perspective. Many had built a beautiful infrastructure, but no one would use it. It was remarkably clear that the biggest challenge facing SOA initiative teams is adoption. Only a few companies talked to me about how much strategic progress they'd made. As I said in the presentation, the success stories were very inspiring. And they all involved an investment in social capital. One thing I found really surprising was that the people from the successful initiatives rarely talked about their infrastructure. I had to explicitly solicit the information from them. From their perspective, the technology was the least important aspect of their initiative. Typically, they built their services using existing application platforms -- they didn't bring in an ESB. I think all of them were using some type of management technology (e.g., Amberpoint or Actional). They rarely talked about design-time governance -- other than improving their SDLC processes. They implemented governance via better processes. Most of it was human-driven, although many use repositories to manage artifacts and coordinate lifecycle. But again, the governance effort was less important than the investment in social capital. I'm still committed to my assertion that governance is critical to a successful SOA initiative-- but only because governance is a means to effect behavioral change. The true success factor is changing behavior. Anne On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 6:17 AM, htshozawa <[EMAIL PROTECTED] com> wrote: > Interesting article. > Just curious Anne, who decided is the project was a success or a > failure and what was the timeframe when the deciding data was measured? > Was it immediately after the project finished or was it may be a year > after? > > I'm just wondering because most people involved in the project will > rate it as a success. :) > > H.Ozawa > > --- In service-orientated- architecture@ yahoogroups. com, "Gervas > > Douglas" <gervas.douglas@ ...> wrote: >> >> According to Burton Group vice president and research director Anne >> Thomas Manes, some users had executed nearly perfectly in terms of >> doing SOA on the IT side, but the initiative had yielded no increased >> agility, quicker time to market or project savings because the >> business remained completely oblivious to the initiative. Yet the >> study also found that users who do break down artificial corporate >> barriers, install proper governance and involve the business have >> runaway success stories to tell. >> > >
