InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum: CTO Reality Check panel

[Updated 05/13/05 to incorporate some thoughts for our NY event from the SOA Executive Forum in San Jose, adding some questions and crossing some out.]

In preparation for InfoWorld's upcoming SOA Executive Forum (May 5 in San Jose, May 17 in NY), both Jon Udell and Phil Windley posted their preliminary thoughts on the panels they are moderating (Defining the SOA Platform and Services and Contracts respectively) to plan for their panels, float some trail balloon topics, solicit feedback on the direction of the panel, and promote discussion in advance. Excellent idea, so I'm following suit. I'm also bookmarking interesting SOA-related materials via del.icio.us here -- expect this list to grow as I prepare for the conference. Like Jon, I'm also tagging my posts about the conference in del.icio.us with the tag InfoWorldSOA2005.

I'm moderating the closing panel of the day entitled "CTO Reality Check," with this simple description: CTOs discuss how Web services and SOA have (or haven't) improved business agility. In other words, this panel is going to focus on what is happening in the real world, something of great interest to me and any other CTO or CIO with day-to-day operational responsibilities. I'm going to do my best to keep the panel away from the kind of blue-sky prognostication that panels sometimes fall into when emerging technologies are being discussed. I know we'll end up talking about the future, but explicitly in the context of what has happened in real enterprises up to this point. Jon's thoughts on his panel helped put my own thoughts into better context, and I'm re-fashioning some of the potential discussion points in his post to fit my panel. I'm hoping my panel will get to the heart of how IT has actually begun embracing SOA in a real way in a world where so many of the questions that will be raised in Jon's panel have incomplete and still-fuzzy answers.

The panelists include: Toby Redshaw, CTO, Motorola (May 5 only); Praveen Sharabu, Director of Enterprise Architecture, CNF Inc. (May 5 only); Marc Saffer, CIO, Columbia House (May 17 only); David Allen, CTO, Visa (May 5 only). Usman Rabbani, Pfizer (May 17 only); Rich Erickson, AT&T (May 17 only).

Some of my initial thoughts on possible areas for discussion (after each panelist takes 5 minutes to give an overview of their business/IT environment and the IT challenges they have faced and are facing):

What is SOA?: With the term SOA embedded in the name of the conference, this might seem like an odd question, but I would like to (briefly) hear the panelists' thoughts on what SOA means to them in the context of what they have been doing in their organizations. (As I have become accustomed to expect, Wikipedia takes a solid stab at defining SOA. And if you don't agree, change it, right?)

What's different this time around?: We've been through various forms of distributed computing (CORBA and DCOM come to mind) and it's tempting to feel a little jaded about SOA. What's different this time around? What do you say to the 52% of managers who are not on top of SOA? (see slide 3 of this PowerPoint for the source of the numbers).

Cultural issues in IT management: It's tempting to jump straight into the nuts-and-bolts details of technical implementation, but cultural issues within IT are critical. What mental shifts (if any) are required for an organization to successfully embrace and implement an SOA, both within IT and in the business? Is this even an issue? What kinds of skills do you look for when hiring into an SOA-enabled organization, and how are they different?

Funding / getting started on an SOA project: You've identified a dozen silos of functionality that can be consolidated. How do you go about getting funding and sponsorship in a decentralized environment? If your IT is on the more centralized end of the spectrum, how do you proceed differently, if at all?

Business agility: What specific business processes or services in your environment were enhanced (or not) by implementing an SOA? How did you identify the ripest candidates for SOA?

Performance: Critics of web services and SOA often point to potential performance issues as a limiting factor. Is that true in practice, and if so, what approaches are being employed to get past this limitation? (A little note on this subject from Brent Sleeper here).

Standards: This is a big one. It's not a particularly artful way to put it, but while the WS-* standards have been slowly developing, the CTOs on my panel have been doing "real stuff." This begs the question of what they were basing this "real stuff" on in terms of standards. On the continuum from the lightweight "Web 2.0 stack" on one end (as Jon refers to approaches based on HTTP, REST, and RSS) to the heavier WS-* standards on the other, what sort of mix was achieved? Will Tim Bray be proven right based on what he wrote last September? "No matter how hard I try, I still think the WS-* stack is bloated, opaque, and insanely complex. I think it’s going to be hard to understand, hard to implement, hard to interoperate, and hard to secure." (Joshua Allen's piece "The War is Over (WS-* vs. POX/HTTP)" looks interesting but his site was delivering errors when I tried to access it just now -- got the link from Tim Bray's very useful Spring 2005 Roundup).

On self-describing data: (wholly lifted from Jon Udell's post) XML messages are the lifeblood of SOA. Their self-descriptive nature is what makes it possible to enforce policy and compose new business logic independently of endpoint applications. Arguably, then, the technologies for structuring, gathering, transforming, storing, and retrieving XML are all key elements of the SOA platform. Are these technologies ready for prime time? And to the extent that they are, have enterprises gotten up to speed with them?

No better people to discuss this than the people on my panel.

Identity / Security: From a piece last fall in InfoWorld ("Identity's Role in SOA"): "Identity and Web services are closely related,” says Jamie Lewis, Burton Group’s CEO and research chair. “It’s almost a yin and yang." . How are enterprises dealing with identity right now? What specific technologies are being employed and with what considerations? Where do emerging standards like SAML, WS-Security, WS-Federation, and WS-Trust fit in (or do they?) Or is the real action happening with relatively simple LDAP or LDAP-like solutions?

Reliability: Many IT operations still struggle with concepts that have been around for quite some time (e.g. software clustering, high-availablity, etc.) In a decentralized service-oriented environment, what must be done to make sure that the SOA environment is reliable?

Advice for those who have not yet embraced SOA: What are some of the biggest "gotchas" and surprises you encountered in your initial SOA projects? What do you know now that you wished you had known two years ago? What standards and approaches should be carefully watched, and what can be safely ignored?

The "reality check" nature of the panel means that the involvement of attendees is critical since a much broader set of real-world experiences will be within the audience than on stage. Although there is a lot to chew on above, I'm going to be sure to leave plenty of time at the end for questions (shooting for a full half hour). In the meantime, please feel free to contact me (chad_dickerson -AT- infoworld.com) with questions and thoughts via e-mail or in your own blogs.

Technorati Tags: InfoWorldSOA2005

Best Treo tip ever

If you've ever been afflicted with a crashing Treo (and boy, I have), you need to know this tip (graciously given to me by Kevin Railsback). For Cingular customers, dial #*377 (that's #*ERR) to find the specific app that caused the crash and a reference to THE LINE OF CODE THAT CAUSED THE RESET! Instructions for all providers are here. My Treo 650 crashed a few minutes ago and I was able to get this message after dialing #*377:


A reset was caused on 04/20/05 at 6:23pm while running "Calendar":
DateDay.c, Line: 2245, Error saving appointment


Interesting, Calendar is a standard Palm app, so I'm not doing anything funky with third-party apps. The stranger thing is that I wasn't using Calendar or saving an appointment at the time of the crash. Oh well, at least I feel like I know a little more about what's going on (and since I rebuilt my Treo carefully last week, it's not crashing that often now anyway).

We are now "tagalicious"

We're doing some cool stuff with tags, driven by Matt McAlister, who explains on his blog: "how to combine both freeform and structured tags."

David Weinberger comments (and Matt responds in an update to his original post above).

Though our experiment is in the earliest stages, we're very excited about this over here. A big thanks to Derek Butcher (our Director of Engineering) for putting the backend together. We'll see where this goes. . . .

Incidentally, Scott Rosenberg describes the internal challenge of tagging quite well in his post from January, referring to the building of the Salon Directory (back when I was at Salon, so I remember it well!). A brief snippet:

I think the issue may be less the scale of individual tags (50 billion "cat" photos!) than the scale of human enthusiasm for doing the slog-work of classification. Geeks love tidying up their personal dataspaces because, obviously, they're geeks. For the rest of the world, my hunch is that -- even when they're only classifying the tiny sliver of stuff that's their own -- most people would rather do almost anything else.

Getting paid: participate in our annual IT salary survey

InfoWorld is currently gathering data for its annual salary survey, with the results running in mid-June. The more data, the better. You can participate by filling out the survey here (until May 2). To get a sense of the kind of information we ultimately report, take a look at last year's survey.

Learning about podcasting

I've learned a lot about podcasting in the past several weeks. Mike Dunn (a founding member of our CTO Advisory Council and fellow traditional media company veteran) has been quietly bringing me around to the concept. Mike introduced me to Eric Rice earlier this week over a great dinner, and I learned even more from one of the real pros (incidentally, one who has blazed the trail for sponsored webcasts). Aside from podcasting, I learned that the video you can capture with a Canon digital camera is actually pretty good (a cheap Canon SD110 in my case -- I had always ignored the video feature). This inspired me to sign up for ourmedia and upload a couple of not-so-artistic videos from my Canon to my ourmedia page (at the time of this post, the videos were still being processed and were not yet available -- ourmedia is very cool, but still in alpha. If you haven't heard of it, definitely check it out. FAQ here).

Back to podcasting. . . . Mike writes in his blog entry:

teaser: look for something else exciting from one (maybe two) of us sooner rather than later

Stay tuned!

Lotus Notes dying? A look at the numbers

From Forbes, "IBM in Denial Over Lotus Notes", a piece with numbers that suggest that Lotus Notes is clearly in decline in 2005.

Conceived in 1984 and introduced in 1989, Notes has a user interface that some consider dated and overly complex. The product is also costly to operate, some say.

Even IBM seems to think something new is needed. It has developed an e-mail program called Workplace Messaging, which is part of a new family of software products.

IBM says Workplace Messaging won't replace Notes. Instead, IBM says Notes will, ahem, evolve and become part of the Workplace family.

The truth is that the spin is aimed at keeping Notes customers from dropping Notes and switching to something else.

Meanwhile, Notes consultants have resorted to bashing market researchers who say Notes is slipping, suggesting on blogs that these analysts are extreme outliers who lack credibility and/or are shills who were paid off by Microsoft.

But the fact is that all but one of the top market research firms say Microsoft Exchange is now the leading e-mail product. Even Gartner Group, the lone holdout, says IBM maintained a mere 1.8% market share lead--but that was in 2003.

What the latest buzz words mean

What a great idea for a column: "Beneath the Buzz" from CIO Magazine:

Author and consultant Dean Meyer takes a critical look at today's hot leadership buzzwords and deciphers the fundamental components of their effective implementation. He dissects a new buzzword each month.

Buzz words already covered: ITIL, Governance, Portfolio Management

[via Phil Windley]

Standardize your hardware

My latest InfoWorld column ("Options add to end-user complications") urges IT managers to aggressively standardize end-user hardware. I'm already getting e-mail suggesting that the standardization of end-user hardware might just be a breed of IT-specific fascism in which the needs of IT are exalted over those of the individual.

I don't want to get too deep into analogies with IT and political systems (one must never forget Godwin's Law in these types of discussions), but I don't think standardizing end-user hardware in a corporate environment is particularly iron-fisted when done with concern for the employees of your company. (Note: we have a mixed PC and Mac end-user environment at InfoWorld. On the Mac side, standardization is a given because you have no other choice, so there's not much advice to offer there except "go all Mac!" but I'm leaving that topic alone for now.) In InfoWorld's case, because we have standardized our PC environment, I made sure that we adopted a more-or-less unassailable standard -- the IBM Thinkpad T42 (or the T series, more generally). The T42 is clearly a world-class laptop (see all the awards) and we load ours up with 1GB RAM and a 3-year on-site service contract (suprisingly inexpensive over the life of a laptop -- completely worth it).

So, while I continue to urge IT managers to aggressively adopt hardware standards on the PC side, I want to equally emphasize that the standard should be a good one. Standardizing on a bunch of cheap, heavy $900 laptops is probably going to cause more trouble than it's worth in the end.