01.29.09
Posted in Cloud, SOA & Web Services at 1:55 pm by Tony Baer
Hats off to Dana Gardner who finally put a coda on the discussion about the so-called death of SOA with a podcast that included among others Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group, who triggered the flame war a the beginning of the year. It gave Manes a chance to clarify that the purpose of her provocative blog was to stir up the age-old conversation that technologies won’t sell the business. “If you are an IT group and you are trying to get funding for some projects — and you go forward with a proposal that says we need to do SOA, because SOA is good, it’s going to get shot down.”
As we’d note, Anne was simply updating the classic argument that the business wants solutions that address business problems and deliver business value. Since the popping of the dot com bubble, few enterprises have had any appetite for technology projects justified on the basis of technology – and before that, appetite for technology was simply a defensive matter of trying to keep your best junior Java developers from jumping ship to an Internet start-up. But given the fact that technology buzzwords still have sex appeal to those who still command some budget, those who were promoting SOA needed to get their eyes back on the ball.
The hand-wringing over SOA, which architecturally was supposed to be The Next Big Thing, was hardly new. Gardner and fellow analyst/blogger Joe McKendrick and the rest of us were throwing around this topic back last spring, witness Gardner’s observation that “SOA in of itself is not enough to overcome the many obstacles on the path to ongoing and effective business and cultural transformation.”
On the recent podcast, consultant and Blue Mountain Labs founder Dave Linthicum concurred with Manes that “the majority of people out there who are wrestling around with architecture are ill-equipped to solve some of the issues.” Ergo, they focus on the plumbing, losing sight of the business problem they were supposed to address, or the additional architectural problems they were creating. Forrester analyst Jim Kobielus added that our new infatuation with the cloud may also solve more problems than it addresses. “We all now focus on services. Now, we’re moving into the world of cloud computing and you know what? A nebulous environment has gotten even more nebulous,” he said, referring to new, more complex governance and service level accountability issues that teams may not realize they are wading into. McKendrick and analyst JP Morgenthal, observed that there is a kind of men vs. boys parting of the ways occurring: the companies that are doing well with their SOA implementations are doing so not because of SOA, but because they already have sound IT/business alignment and architectural discipline.
Catch a summary of the discussion here, a full transcript here, or listen to the podcast here.
Permalink
01.12.09
Posted in Application Development, Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), IT Governance, ITIL, SOA & Web Services at 8:00 am by Tony Baer
Turns out that the new year wouldn’t be complete without yet another SOA is dead flame war, touched off by Anne Thomas Mane’s provocative comments that stated, to the effect, that SOA is dead, long live services. As inveterate SOA blogger Joe McKendrick has noted, it’s a debate that’s come and gone over the years, and in its latest incarnation has drawn plenty of reaction, both defensive, and on target – that the problem is that practitioners get hung up on technology, not solutions. Or as Manes later clarified, it’s about tangibles like services, and solid practices like applying application portfolio management that deliver business value, not just technology for its own sake.
We could be glib and respond that Francisco Franco is still dead, but Mane’s clarification struck a chord. All too often in software development, we leap then look. We were reminded of that with an interesting announcement this week from SOA Software. Their contention is that there is a major gap at the front end of the SOA lifecycle, at least when it comes to vendor-supplied solutions. Specifically, it is over managing service portfolios – making investment decisions as to whether a service is worth developing, or worth continuing.
SOA Software contends that service repositories are suited for managing the design and development lifecycles of the service, while run-time management is suited for tracking consumption, policy compliance, service contract compliance, and quality of service monitoring. However, existing SOA governance tools omit the portfolio management function.
Well, there’s a gap when it comes to portfolio management of services, except that there isn’t: there is an established market and practice for project portfolio management (PPM), which applies financial portfolio analysis techniques to analyzing software development projects to help decision makers identify which projects should get greenlighted, and which existing efforts should have the plugs pulled.
The downside to PPM is that it’s damn complex, and mandates comprehensive data collection encompassing timesheet data, all data relating what’s paid to software vendors and consultants, and infrastructure consumption. We also have another beef, that in most IT organizations, new software development or implementation projects account for 10% of budgets or less. The bottom line is, PPM is complex, hard, and anyway, shouldn’t it also cover the 80 – 90% of the software budget that is devoted to maintenance?
But anyway, SOA Software contends that PPM is overkill for managing service portfolios. Their new offering, Service Portfolio Manager, is essentially a “lite” PPM tool that is applied specifically to services. Their tool factors in four basic artifacts: existing (as-is) business processes or application functionality; identifiers for candidate services such as “customer load qualifier;” ranking of business priorities; and metadata for services that are greenlighted for development and production.
We understand that SOA Software is attempting to be pragmatic about all this. They claim most of their clients have either not bothered with PPM, or have not been successful in implementing it because of its scope and overhead, and it’s better to manage even if it’s for a special case. And they see plenty of demand from their client base for a more manageable service-oriented PPM alternative.
But we have to wonder if it makes sense to erect yet another governance silo, or if SOA really merits a special case. The problem is that if we view SOA as a special case, now we wind up with yet another level of managerial silo and more process complexity. It also divorces SOA – or services if you prefer—supports the business. If SOA is a special case, then it must be an island of technology that has to be managed uniquely. In the long run, that will only increase management costs, and in the end reinforce the notion that SOA is a workaround to the bottlenecks of enterprise, application, or process integration, and a band-aid to poor or nonexistent enterprise architecture.
It also further isolates SOA or services from the software development lifecycle (SDLC), of which they should be an integral part. While services are not monolithic applications, are extensions or composites of applications and other artifacts such as feeds, they are still software. From a governance standpoint, the criteria for developing and publishing services should not be distinct from developing and implementing software.
And while we’re at it, we also believe that the run-time governance of SOA or services cannot be divorced from the physical aspects of running IT infrastructure. Service level management of SOA services is directly impacted by how effectively IT delivers business services, which is the discipline of IT Service Management (ITSM). When there is a problem with publishing a service, it should become an incident that is managed, not within its own SOA cocoon, but as an IT service event that might involve problems with software or infrastructure. In the long run, service repositories should be federated with CMDBs that track how different elements of IT infrastructure are configured.
In the short run, SOA Software’s Service Portfolio Manager is a pragmatic solution for early adopters who have drank the SOA Kool Aid and mainstreamed service implementation, but lack adequate governance when it comes to the SDLC (and enterprise architecture, by implication). In the long run, it should serve as a wakeup call to simplify PPM applying the 80/20 rule, making it more usable rather than spawning special case implementations.
Permalink
01.05.09
Posted in Cloud, Green, Technology Market Trends at 1:54 am by Tony Baer
The concept of planning horizon is critical to the successful functioning of any enterprise. While publicly held companies are often enslaved to quarterly earnings, obviously, having longer term views can hopefully enable enterprises to avoid chasing their tails as conditions change. According to management consultant and author Jeffrey Phillips, well-managed businesses should maintain a horizon stretching over several years while making mid-course adjustments every 3 to 6 months.
Yet a trip back through 2008 reveals the difficulty of maintaining appropriate planning horizons. Although rumblings of a global credit crisis date back several years, what’s amazing is how a string of events triggered by the failure of Lehman Brothers abruptly changed the global economic outlook over a hellish weekend back in September.
The whirlwind certainly caught us unprepared. Barely days after the Lehman collapse, we commented on a presentation on renewable energy and sustainability delivered by Google’s Eric Schmidt. Schmidt’s talk prompted us to reflect on the tortured history of sustainability initiatives over the past 30 years. The arguments put forth today over conserving resources, promoting renewable energy, and building smarter grids, smarter buildings, and more efficient cars are nothing new. During the initial spurt of solar energy R&D in the late 1970s, practitioners relied on concepts such as lifecycle costing to justify investments in solar heating, hot water, and photovoltaic systems based on then-current assumptions over oil and utility pricing trends.
The problem however is that economic and political cycles keep getting in the way. Just as interest peaked in 1979-80, it dropped to the floor as the recession of the early 1980s depressed demand. The cycle fed on itself as energy producers began inflating supply in relation to demand in mad grabs for market share, even as the economy recovered later that decade. And then history repeated itself in the wake of Desert Storm and the recession/recovery of the 1990s.
Although by last September, oil prices had declined from their $130/bbl summer peak, the outlook was still one of rising global demand fueled by continued growth of the world’s two most populous and fastest growing economies, China and India. Fast forward to the present, and oil prices have cratered to $35/bbl levels. Put another way, last summer, it seemed like a recurrence of 1979-80; barely a couple months later, it looked like a replay of 2001 – 2.
Admittedly, sustainability policy is hostage to planning horizons. In the long run, all resources are finite, and for all economic cycles, whatever goes down eventually goes back up. But in the interim decade or century, oil prices will rise or fall to whatever the market will bear – the Saudis will see to that. Their goal is clearly to prevent the market from turning away from the gas pumps.
Sustainability is also hostage to strategic considerations that, depending on your point of view, either reflect or reject economic rationality. Specifically, we’re talking about national security and environmental concerns. In the long run, is it economically sustainable to rely on one of the world’s most unstable regions? In the long run, is it sustainable to postpone the environmental costs of CO2 buildup? Is renewable energy sufficient or reliable? Can solar deliver energy densities on a par with fossil fuels or nuclear?
Of course, sustainability is not only a question of energy consumption, but of consumption of any resource. As long as you had fast-growing economies consuming all our scrap metal, paper, and plastic, there was little question as to the merits of recycling. The crunch comes when there’s an economic slump, like right now, where the market for recyclables has fallen through the floor. In the short run, it’s still cheaper to dispose as the supply lines are far shorter and the routes and infrastructure more established. Yet there is a long-run cost to disposal that the market has not factored because for now there is still an adequate supply of landfill capacity, and the future costs of remediation are not reflected in current tipping costs. When it comes to carbon footprint, total cost of ownership (TCO) projections are still the stuff of fantasy.
The big problem about sustainability and green is that the economics are so hazy. Supply and demand keeps spiking, while lifecycle costs are not reflected in market pricing. How can you have a rational market and make rational decisions under such conditions? A 2007 McKinsey report gave a hint of the possibilities and complexities involved in making such numbers firm, at least for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
However, let’s get back to the here and now. Businesses that were getting pounded by rising energy prices were making contingency plans for reducing their resource consumption footprints. As my Ovum colleague Warren Wilson pointed out, the IT industry has a major role to play in helping businesses grow more sustainable because they run the systems that run operations. IT’s role in promoting sustainability is the subject of a current IBM marketing campaign entitled The Smarter Planet. Yet, Wilson cited a recent survey of over 8000 European IT executives that found less than 40% were concerned over their organization’s energy and carbon footprints.
We’re not terribly surprised at the underwhelming response. Going forward, we are in a recession where there is little if any consensus on when the bottom will come. Paraphrasing FDR’s inaugural speech that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, the psychology of recession in the short term trumps all thinking about sustainability. A lot of firms that are public are not venturing forecasts for anything beyond the next quarter. At this point, survival – keeping the lights on – is at top of mind.
The bottom line is that shifting attitudes are all about planning horizons. Over the past year, the economy whipsawed business in a game of she-loves-me-she-loves-me-not. When perceptions and realities change so rapidly that it is difficult to understand what to believe and what assumptions to make, it is all but impossible to credibly plan with long-term windows. Sustainability is one of the short-term victims as business -– and IT of course -– struggles to keep the lights on.
To the extent that we’re naïve enough to make short term forecasts, our outlook for 2009 is the dogged pursuit of cost savings. Sustainability will play a supporting role in two respects: first, as part of national energy independence strategies that may emerge in spite of the recession, but more importantly, as a byproduct of cost reduction strategies such as use of the cloud. While in the long run the economics of the cloud have yet to be proven, in tough times, clouds provide great ways for hedging bets as IT organizations pay only for renting rather than buying capacity. The sustainability angle emerges indirectly: as IT organizations embrace the cloud, using a common resource can contribute towards reducing carbon footprints and resource consumption as computing resources themselves are more effectively rationalized.
Postscript
Our thoughts on what’s ahead for 2009 were captured in more detail in a new Dana Gardner BriefingsDirect podcast, which also included prognostications from colleagues including Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research; Brad Shimmin, principal analyst at Current Analysis; Joe McKendrick, independent analyst and prolific blogger; Dave Linthicum, founder of Linthicum Group; Mike Meehan, senior analyst at Current Analysis, and JP Morgenthal, senior analyst at Burton Group.
Click here to read a summary of our discussion, and here to listen to the podcast.
Permalink