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2009 New Year?s Resolution: Rethink your Training Strategy
Document ID: ZAPFLASH-2008121 | Document Type: ZapFlash
/By: Ronald Schmelzer/
Posted: Dec. 01, 2008
As we wrap up Thanksgiving Day (in the United States) and head into the
greater part of the winter holiday season, our thoughts inevitably turn
to an evaluation of the year gone by and goals for improvement in the
year ahead. Some of us may even promise to exercise more, eat more
healthfully, and take care of our personal lives better, and we may
indeed keep those promises. But at ZapThink we would like you to commit
to a New Year?s resolution we know you can keep: improve your
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) skills by rethinking your SOA
training strategy.
ZapThink is fond of saying that ?SOA is something you /do/, not
something you /buy/
<http://www.zapthink.com/report.html?id=ZAPFLASH-2007816>.? Yet many
so-called architects short-cut the step of actually doing architecture
by hoping to buy their way to SOA. By now, we don?t have to tell you
that you won?t get SOA by simply accumulating a set of SOA
infrastructure products, development tools, or Services from enterprise
application products
<http://www.zapthink.com/report.html?id=ZAPFLASH-20081117>. You know
that architecture is a discipline and set of activities that affect not
just the technology, but also the organization, governance, and
processes of the business. Yet, while you might know all that
implicitly, your actions belie your beliefs. Even after buying those
tools, many resort to learning SOA by simply learning how to use the
tools they?ve purchased. This approach to learning how to do SOA simply
won?t work. Doing SOA right means learning how to do SOA ? not just how
to implement a vendor?s SOA infrastructure products.
In order to make progress on SOA in 2009, you should look at how you?re
gaining SOA expertise. Have you thought about how you are learning to do
SOA? And how to do it right? Have you thought about who you are getting
that education from and what are their motivations? Is it possible
you?re paying for SOA training but just getting product-specific
implementation and developer-level training? After all that training are
you still scratching your head wondering how (or if) you?ve done it
right? If so, you need to rethink how you acquire the critical skills
necessary to make SOA a critical success.
*The Problem with Vendor-Specific Architecture Education*
Architecture is not development
<http://www.zapthink.com/report.html?id=ZAPFLASH-20061130>. Assembling a
bunch of Services does not yield an SOA. Perhaps you already know that.
But what about your training and skills development efforts reinforce
those beliefs? In order to separate the activities of architecture from
development, you need to learn the methods, practices, disciplines, and
approaches of architecture. Architectural training focuses on acquiring
expertise on how to actually /do/ the various activities of
architecture. This means that at the end of a given training activity,
you should be able to use /any tool or SOA infrastructure product/ to
design a Service, implement a Service model, run effective governance,
quality, and management (GQM)
<http://www.zapthink.com/report.html?id=ZAPFLASH-200765>, manage a
Service domain, implement a SOA test plan, among other activities. Yes,
it is true that to actually build and run those Services you will need
more training to learn how those tools work, but if you don?t have
expertise in the abovementioned fundamentals, how do you ever stand a
chance?
To further reinforce the ?learn methods before learning tools? best
practice, it should be said that learning SOA is not simply a matter of
learning how to use tools. To use an analogy, don?t confuse knowing how
to use a cake mixer with knowing how to bake a cake. Anybody with a few
minutes can learn how a cake mixer works and what its various settings
are, but learning how to bake a cake takes time and experience to master.
So where does the ?tools before methods? sub-optimal style of training
come from? Many SOA infrastructure and development tool vendors offer
SOA training as part of their offerings, and many end-users opt for the
path of least resistance (or cost) and get their training from these
vendors. While a handful of these vendors put some effort into
incorporating vendor-neutral, industry-wide best practices and
methodologies into their training curricula, most of these vendors
simply see SOA training as a means to selfish ends. Some notable SOA
vendors have admitted to us that they see SOA training as ?loss leaders?
to sell other things such as software or services. From this
perspective, they offer training at greatly reduced prices or even free
as a way of qualifying the customer to buy more stuff. It?s sort of like
those ?exclusive passes? you get to distributor showrooms to demonstrate
something when all you?ve done is volunteered yourself for a multi-day
sales pitch on their offerings. Are you doing yourself any service by
skim-coating your SOA activities with a smattering of SOA methodologies
know-how while diving deep into implementation details of SOA Vendor
Product version 3.2? We at ZapThink think not.
Other SOA vendors have admitted to us that they see training as part of
their customer support efforts. These vendors see training as a way of
helping customers use their products. In these cases, the training is
not meant to actually enable organizations to fill in the missing gaps
in their SOA skills, but rather to maximize customer satisfaction with
products already purchased. End users that see training as an aspect of
support should prepare themselves for the need to always play catch-up.
No thought-leading organization would relegate training in such a manner.
Lest you think that software vendors are alone with such training
practices, we can assure you that we?ve seen SOA consulting firms of all
sizes likewise approach training as a pre-sales consulting add-on or as
a checklist item in an RFP delivery. ZapThink recently provided training
for an organization that had previously brought in a well-known SOA
consultancy to provide SOA training. The customer's complaint was that
the consultant knew the material in the course, but any time someone had
a question that wasn't specifically about the material, the answer was
"I'll have to get back to you on that." This is simply unacceptable. SOA
trainers need to be architects and SOA experts. Any /schmoe/ can read
slides and fuddle their way through SOA exercises, but actually gaining
expertise in how to do SOA right requires learning from someone who has
both experience in the space as well as knowledge on SOA skills
development. This requires a breadth of experience that goes beyond the
material itself.
If the self-serving sales and support focus wasn?t enough, what makes
this consultant/vendor-driven SOA training particularly problematic is
that many such training courses masquerade proprietary vendor or
consultant methods as industry best practices. Vendors and consultants
often develop courses around a methodology they developed for a
customer. This content then makes its way into training curricula
without any third-party vetting of those practices or even an
understanding of other practices in the space with which to compare.
Smart architects should press these trainers to explain how their
approaches compare to others in the space and explain what about their
practices are indeed ?best?. Furthermore, IT managers should demand that
SOA training curriculum be vetted by credible third-parties to ensure
that they are not simply getting indoctrinated into proprietary
approaches that promote single-vendor or single-consultant lock-in. You
deserve /pragmatic/ SOA training, not /dogmatic/ SOA training.
*The ZapThink Take*
If you haven?t already noticed, ZapThink has a bone to pick with much of
the so-called SOA training currently offered in the market. Certainly
there is a role for vendor-specific training, and the best source for
such product-specific or consultant-proprietary offerings is the firms
themselves that developed those tools and approaches. However, those
that are serious about developing SOA skills need to beware the training
version of Vendor-Driven Architecture (VDA)
<http://www.zapthink.com/report.html?id=ZAPFLASH-2007920>. Just as you
should only buy tools once you have determined your architecture and not
vice-versa, you should buy vendor-specific training only once you have
already mastered the fundamentals of architecture that are necessary to
implement any vendor or consultant?s offerings well.
Architects should also understand that the Return on Investment (ROI)
for training and skills enhancement far outweighs that of tools
purchases or consulting engagements. While a good SOA tool can return up
to 200% of value over the investment, good training returns tens of
thousands of percentage points of value. A single four-day course of the
type we recommend above can cost as little as $2,000
<http://www.zapthink.com/lza.html>, but yield hundreds of thousands of
dollars of returned value in accelerated SOA initiatives, higher overall
project quality, reduced waste in development and tool purchasing, and
better overall alignment of the SOA activities with business
requirements. Investing in tools is a capital expense that is amortized
across multiple SOA projects. Investing in skills development is an
operational expense that yields persistent returns throughout the
lifetime of the human resource. Furthermore, while the ROI of tools
investments are perishable, the ROI of training and skills enhancements
are permanent. Vendor training is highly perishable since as soon as the
tools change, your product-specific training becomes obsolete. Whereas
methodology training is highly durable ? even as methodologies evolve,
they simply improve on what?s been done before or just add more
capabilities.
At the end of the day, who is in charge of your architecture? You! You
control the evolution of your architecture, so you should be in control
of your education. ZapThink has a vested interested in the growth of SOA
as a credible and valuable discipline. And this requires that we rethink
our approach to training. Put this in your resolution list for 2009.
