Technorati Tags: cdi, distributed system, information infrastructure, mdm, truisms

I have long said that the failure of SOA programs has to do more with politics of data/process ownership than the technologies on which you build these enterprise SOA initiatives. Furthermore, that the failure to address the information models as first class citizens in a Service Oriented Architecture presents huge risks to both adoption and down stream architectural stability.

As background, working for an Information Infrastructure company, and having worked from a “computer company” in the past, the realization is startling wrt. how easy it is to “re platform” and application (note Sun’s precipitous decline in the face of Linux) vs. re-platform it’s data… after all: Computers are worthless if they have no data to process. And to further this point, as processors got faster, at a rate much higher than the busses that fed them, they became more like space heaters. On the other hand, the information supply chain has grown in relevance as technologies like de-duplication, parallel readers, advanced caching algorythms and even flash disks prove to have a more substantial impact on timeliness of result and thus architectural criticality.

So what does that background have to do with our story? Well all businesses are being told to do more with less; investments are being targeted to deliver real ROI as measured in Revenue, and to some extent, though SOA enabled processes support the automation of processing paths, the programs that I have seen fall short in that traditional SOA offers enterprises the OO promise of a singular Service (first class) which is responsible for Employees, Customers, Accounting, the business unit functions, and this falls short when you ask the simple question… but really who owns the “Customer”… Okay so now everyone raises their hand… the problem now becomes one not of a singular service, but the federation of capabilities across systems exposed through a consistent interface… all well and good until you ask: what is the information model upon which these interactions act. Again, the political fight ensues as to who has the best model, to which there is no answer except the one “whomever has the money makes the rules”… okay so sales wins. No really, SOA needs to become substantially more grounded in information modeling and Model transformational techniques with the recognition that there will never be a single canonical model for the business. But, how do we navigate across these models? EIM(MDM)/EII(MDM) techniques of course? But as we build these transforms to move from model A to model B potentially through some canonical intermediate, we need to concern our self with the impact of changes models included within the orchestration… enter model governance. Yes, the G-word. Governance seems to be the impossible cross-matrixing of staff to produce some semblance of order within a process in which politics, unknowns and of course expectations wreak havoc on the scientific method. One of the critical expectations which needs to be continually addressed is timely-ROI, you have but 6 months to demonstrated tangible evidence of success or you risk losing support… now back to the software development/SOA domain.

eSOA programs have long put waterfall methodologies out of vogue because they seemed to lack “pace and progress” to this end tight spiral RUP based methodologies and even the Agile methods have come into vogue. Learning from that, there is an opportunity for Information Architects to emerge that don’t boil the ocean, but do through an iterative and constructive process continually refine the models, transforms, interactions, accessory/usage policies, stewarding mechanisms that are required to improve consistency (think SEI/CMM scale). Sure, it’s a never ending journey, but at least you don’t get too far away from the business to be viewed as a field of dreams (inconsequential). To this end “Agile Data Governance” is coming into vogue, alongside the realization that SOA, like IT is about the information, and forgetting that we are doomed to follow in the footsteps of failed efforts.

Technorati Tags: cdi, change management, distributed system, information infrastructure, mdm, soa

I have long been a fan of Peter Deutsch’s fallacies (btw I’m not alone, Google this AM produced over 22k references) of network/distributed computing, they have served as a set of guiding checkpoints for every distributed system that I have built. What I have found to be missing, however, is a similar set of fallacies/truisms for managing Information while we approach “internet scale” information infrastructure… the information explosion.

Truisms defined by/principles for managing information explosion:

1. no one person/system is capable of managing all data
2. optimizations will be continually applied, but by different vendors, thereby requiring an enterprise to distribute their information architecture
3. information processing is inherently a pipelined process (though fork/join supports parallelism for reduction of latency)
4. these pipeline’s can have “in parallel” replicas so long as sufficient locking is engineered, and compensation models supported
5. locking for a given pipeline should be owned discretely by a single application context (workflow) - though this workflow may be complex, it is stateless upon completion of end state
6. loose coupling / jit integration require coherent, federable, data dictionaries and meta-data/structure maps

Translated to Fallacies… which, agreeing with SGG, I think are way more powerful, and in some cases hilarious.

1. there is one enterprise data architect who is responsible for the master models
2. there is a system who is the authoritative master for a given entity domain
3. there is one vendor involved across the SOA and EIM domain
4. the data models are largely fixed, and the business will not ask for further changes/enhancements to the model
5. data exchange will be based upon XA/2-phase transactional mechanisms to achieve ACID properties (pessimistic transactionality)
6. there will be a singular data dictionary, with complete meta-data for a given entity domain

Additions/Subtractions/debate most wanted!

Technorati Tags: distributed system, information infrastructure, truisms

Tom Maguire pointed me to an interesting podcast from Marty Moseley, CTO of Initiate Systems, one of 2 remaining leadership quadrant companies in CDI & MDM (the other being Siperian). Marty wanes relatively eloquently on this “third pass” at MDM, and the challenges that MDM faces/addresses within a SOA/BPM oriented set of orchestrated activities.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Web-Services-and-SOA/Orchestrating-Your-Data/

My take, nothing outlandish or incredibly insightful, but does give a primer to the value of MDM within a SOA…

Technorati Tags: cdi, mdm, soa

Wow am I remiss for not posting this article sooner…

SAP has agreed to include data federation tools from Informatica with some of its enterprise resource planning and analytics products.

The combination of the two products is intended to help customers analyze data stored in third-party or legacy systems. It also solves a marketing problem for SAP, as the applications from Informatica will help the company sell into larger enterprises with heterogeneous environments.

Under the terms of their agreement, SAP will embed Informatica’s PowerCenter, PowerExchange and Metadata Manager software into its performance management and business analytic applications and the NetWeaver platform for master data management and business intelligence.

My take: SAP is going head to head with Oracle… Oracle has been acquiring EIM assets at a rapid clip with Sunopsis and Hyperion, SAP has been building their own NetWeaver based BI offering, but there was huge traction with Hyperion to provide the enterprise wide integrated reporting so key to leveraging SAP’s information, but alas, this is no more. Now SAP must figure out how to fill that gap with an existing enterprise domain player to empower their own offer… enter Informatica. Hmmmm….

I was recently asked to contribute to a couple of articles(The Merging of SOA and Web 2.0,Experts See Link Between Virtualization, SOA) by Darryl Taft of eWeek(Ziff Davis). I initially took an excessively “SOI” approach to this discussion only to have a conversation with Steve Graham that really helped me establish a more realistic set of comments around the junction between Web2.0 (with it’s requisite behavioral challenges around collaboration, composition and empowerment/personalization), and my natural slant toward SOA - namely the changing dynamics of system composition with a strong bent toward “systemness” or NFR’s.
The quote is certainly more accurately attributed to sgg, but is certainly a collaboration!
Thanks Steve!

Technorati Tags: distributed system, rest, soa, ws

My feelings about WS-* vs. REST have never been hidden, in fact I wear them on my sleeve, and this analogy really cracked me up… some interesting comments as well.
The Cafes » North and South :

The analogy isn’t as silly as it sounds either. North Korean/Soviet style “communism” fails because it believes massive central planning works better than the individual decisions of millions of economic actors. WS-* fails because it believes massive central planning works better than the individual decisions of millions of web sites. It’s no coincidence that the WS-* community constantly churns out volume after volume of specification and one tool after another. The WS-* community really believes that developers are too stupid to be allowed to manage themselves. Developers have to be told what to do and kept from getting their grubby little hands all over the network protocols because they can’t be trusted to make the right choices.

Long live the empowered (highest common denominator) developer, see you in the deep end!

Technorati Tags: distributed system, ws, soa, rest