The South East Asia SOA Weblog

I’d like to share some good news for IT practitioners in Jakarta.

IASA Indonesia Chapter is hosting the 1st ITARC in Indonesia. ITARC (IT Architect Regional Conference) is the largest regional event that addresses the needs of IT architects today. It’s held in several countries in the region, like Malaysia, Singapore, Bangkok and Indonesia annually. ITARC Indonesia will be held on November 13 and 14, 2008 in Menara Peninsula Hotel, Jakarta, Indonesia.

The event features world renowned architecture gurus like Grady Booch, inventor of UML (LinkedIn profile) and Scott Ambler, pioneer of Agile methodology (LinkedIn profile). Two of PWS directors will also participate to speak in the event, Mr. David Forden (LinkedIn profile) and myself (LinkedIn profile). We will be speaking about Enterprise Architecture and Business Process Management.

This is really a unique opportunities to IT architects in Jakarta and other IT practitioners in general to come, learn, share and broaden their knowledge and capabilities around IT architecture and other facets of IT. For more information and registration details, please visit http://www.iasahome.org/web/itarc/indonesia

Definitely something you don’t want to miss!

With organisations like the IASA (International Association of Software Architects) growing momentum in South East Asia, it is now very clear that the community of architects is set to strengthen. In the near term however, strong leadership is needed in order to guide the community down the path to productivity.

Historically in Asia we have experienced a very hands on approach in the IT industry and organizations have typically focused on delivery of basic features and functions with less emphasis on the finer points of architecture and design. This approach is a double edged sword as it not only cheapens the industry as a whole but it also lowers the value that IT brings to business.

The era of SOA is to an extent set to change this continuum but the transition will take time as the level of thinking required to design a solution from which the business can truly benefit needs top be raised. Executing on enterprise architecture at this level takes actual experience and that just cannot be taught in universities.

For businesses, the stakes are already getting higher with deregulation and experienced foreign competitors hitting the local markets in all industries. Regulatory controls can only protect markets for so long as the pressure of globalization and trade agreements tears down the borders and exposes traditional markets to foreign competition. I am not yet convinced that many South East Asian businesses truly recognize this. The days of procrastination and cheap noddy solutions are over.

It is high time for South East Asia to adopt more mature processes for evolving enterprise architectures and grow the talent pool. The cost of IT is a very small line item in the context of what it can deliver to a business… just think of the 1,2,3 and 5% improvements that can be delivered to a $2B business and run that through your ROI calculator.

I just came back from BEA Welcome Event in Dharmawangsa Hotel, Jakarta last week (August 14, 2008). The event talks about the new product road map for Oracle middleware after the acquisition of BEA Systems.

Actually the road map has been made official since July 1st, 2008, complete webcast and presentation of the entire roadmap can be found in Oracle website here.

In the BPM area, as Bruce Silver predicted before in his observation, Oracle is trying to combine Oracle BPEL Process Manager and BEA Aqua Logic BPM into one integrated BPM solution. Oracle BPEL Process Manager is targeting the enterprise integration perspective with its support towards Web Service standard and BEA ALBPM is targeted towards workflow and business process optimization perspective.

At this moment, the two solutions still feel as separate solutions, with each of them has its own IDE and running environment, maybe Oracle will try to combine them in the future into one integrated framework for BPM. We’ll see how it develops.

I will be running the Business Process Management Workshops in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur by the end of this month.

This 2-days workshop is titled “Implementing Continuous Improvement in Your Organization”. It is organized by JCCreative and supported by PWS Consulting and IASA. We will be discussing about the BPM Implementation Framework in details and how to embed BPM within the organization and aligning it with other technology initiatives like SOA, ECM and Web 2.0

The BPM Implementation Framework itself is a 10-phase implementation framework which covers the following:

• Organization Foundation
• Process Foundation
• Technology Foundation
• Elaboration
• Improvement
• People and Technology Development
• Deployment
• Monitor and Benefit Realization
• Continuous Improvement

The framework will guide the organization by providing a solid reference in implementing BPM. It will touch essential elements, like:

• Aligning the BPM initiative with the organization strategy
• Setting up rules and guidelines for the process models
• Taking a look at the IT infrastructures that support the BPM initiative
• Setting up the project goals, business case and project teams for the execution of the projects
• Understanding, modeling and baselining based on the current processes
• Improving and prioritizing the improvements
• People development, people change management and integrating supporting IT infrastructure to develop an automated BPM solution
• Deployment, training of staffs
• Monitoring and realizing the BPM benefits in each phase of the framework
• Last, but not least, embedding and converting the results of the project into the business-as-usual daily activities

The workshop targets a broad range of audience from business process consultants, architects, IT consultants to C-level executives. For further information about the workshop and registration details, please visit http://jccreativemax.com/bpm-home1.htm

I am really looking forward for the workshops.

It’s human nature to be messy. A house that always stays neat is a house that is not inhabited, a display house, a sample house. When people come in to the house, the house is bound to be messy, how messy it will be depends on the inhabitants of the house, but at some point in time, you will see dirty plates on the sink, clothes lying on the couch, dirty bathroom and food remains on the floor. But all of that indicate life in the house, it’s not a showroom in some furniture shop, it’s a real house, a home to its inhabitants.

So is IT infrastructure. No matter how well you design a system, it will get tangled over time. Tangled with new functionalities that are urgent and need to be added immediately to accommodate new business needs, old functionalities that are altered to fix bugs, new systems that are introduced, programmers who come and go, documentations which are scattered, you name it! Change is a part of life, so it is a part of IT system life cycle. Things get more challenging if the system is a distributed and loosely coupled system like SOA-based system. SOA infrastructure relies a lot on services, now these services can come from internal sources, can also come from external sources (e.g. partners, suppliers, etc.), legacy systems or any other sources where the IT department has little or no authority to influence.
Services that comprise the SOA infrastructure need to be reliable and re-usable, they need to execute properly within the boundaries of their SLAs, they need to be backward compatible when they are changed, they need to be secure, etc. An SOA infrastructure will not function well without the services functioning as expected.

Out of this mess, the question arises, how to build and maintain a reliable and manageable SOA infrastructure? The answer is as simple as keeping your house neat and tidy. No, it’s not shoving the dirt under the rag, that’s quick but dirty solution to an already messed up situation. There’s the human management aspect of it, where experts of the systems (or their knowledge) need to be retained properly to ensure continuity of the system development and maintenance. The other aspect is governance, SOA governance (wikipedia definition). It should be part of every facet of SOA infrastructure life cycle and it should be executed diligently to ensure the SOA infrastructure stays healthy and agile.

Start from the phase of development, services have to be benchmarked for its suitability for re-use, SLAs are established and maintained, audit and logging to the service activities are put in place, proper testing mechanism, including regression testing, etc. Then comes the staging phase where services are validated against SLAs, simulated in production environment and inter-linked with other services. The production stage governance includes tasks like discovering the service topology, managing SLAs, managing security, keeping track of audit and logging, exception detection and handling and managing changes to the services.

A well-governed SOA implementation will deliver all of the promises of an efficient, transparent and agile system that supports agile business requirements. Without proper governance, it will end up as JBOWS (Just a Bunch Of Web Services) architecture. If your IT department loses visibility of its system and doesn’t really know the service network and interactions inside it, it can not maintain the system well, let alone enhances it. It’s like living in a house so messy that you can not find where you put your plates when you are already starving for dinner.

During my presentation in the “Application Integration Architecture of Excellence” at Sari Pan Pacific Hotel, Jakarta, several questions were asked by the audience related to how much coding and technical development work is required by one organization if they want begin their transition towards SOA. See presentation slide in SlideShare

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The develop-and-deploy paradigm of most IT technical people needs to be changed in light of the re-usability spirit promoted by SOA. SOA is about re-using existing application functionalities and services which have been proven to perform business functions well, then integrate them into an orchestrated service to perform business process. So, the question should not be how much should I develop? It should be how much can I re-use?

When new functionalities are required, an organization can be presented with two options: purchase the packaged application to perform the required business function or develop the application in-house. If purchasing packaged application is opted, then SOA can set the standards for the new application, it has to be SOA-ready (a.k.a. to some technical guys may call it support WS* standards). SOA-ready applications are ready to plug and play to the enterprise service bus, which is the integration backbone of the organization, the effort to integrate it will be relatively minimal. If the organization decides to develop its own application to serve the required business needs, then they need to bear the MVC framework mentality in mind (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-view-controller). Clear separation between Model-View-Controller has been proven to clearly distinguish business functionalities from the underlying data model and the presentation codes. These business functionalities, which is the “C” in “MVC", can then be aggregated into business services that can be plugged into the enterprise service bus. Without clear separation among the Model-View-Controller functionalities, the newly developed application will be difficult to be service-enabled.

The message delivered by SOA is clear: re-use whenever you can, only develop if you really need to, this will save time and cost, this will enable application delivery faster and cheaper. The integrated services will set the necessary ground for future composite applications built re-using current functionalities. This places more importance on proper SOA management and governance to make sure that service discovery and management can be done efficiently. The ROI of the architecture may not be instant, but in the long run, it will make business more agile and more efficient if done correctly.

I will have the privilege to speak on behalf of PWS Consulting Pte. Ltd. in “Application Integration Architecture of Excellence” on June 24, 2008 at Sari Pan Pacific Hotel, Jakarta.

The event is a Lunch Executive Meeting held by Oracle, CTI and PWS Consulting that will discuss about Oracle SOA Suite and how it can help answering the business and IT challenges faced by financial institutions today through SOA and how the technology can bring the architecture to realization. Accompanying me will be my old friend, Mr. Allan Darrell (LinkedIn Profile) from ORIX Indonesia Finance who will be speaking about successful SOA implementation in his organization.

Hope to catch you all in the event!

In a recent observation made by Bruce Silver in Intelligent Enterprise (http://www.intelligententerprise.com/blog/archives/2008/06/the_future_of_b.html), he talks about the future of BPM at Oracle/BEA after the acquisition.

Bruce made an interesting observation about two points of view of looking at BPM solution, one is from integration middleware perspective, the other is from optimization of workflow and business performance.

It looks to me that one is looking at BPM bottom up, while the other is looking at it top down. Oracle and BEA adopts these two different point of views for BPM. Oracle’s approach is more towards looking at BPM from integration perspective, transforming enterprise applications from old-style monoliths to composable services. BEA sees BPM from the straight BPM perspective, from workflow and business performance optimization perspective.

At this point, it is too early to tell what approach will be taken by the Oracle/BEA BPM offering. Bruce Silver predicts that it is possible Oracle will maintain both product lines while still figuring out what to do with them. There will be a Webcast on July 1st 2008 by Oracle President Charles Phillips and Oracle Senior Vice President Thomas Kurian that will explore about the addition of BEA products to Oracle Fusion Middleware. We shall then see what will happen…

Stolen from: http://geekandpoke.typepad.com:

SOA is promising a lot of things to the business world. The beautiful world painted by vendors show that SOA will help making business become simpler, more efficient, more transparent and more agile. SOA also promises re-use of IT assets in loosely-coupling manner that will deliver solutions faster and cheaper in the long run.

SOA paradigm may be relatively new in IT, but those promises are the exact same promises made by previous paradigms before SOA. Then what will make SOA different? What makes it special? Will there be a new paradigm within the next few years that will make the same promise and make SOA obsolete by comparison?

There’s this term coined a few years ago to describe poorly managed SOA implementation: JBOWS (Just a Bunch of Web Services), see: The Rise of the JBOWS Architecture. The term describes about SOA implementation with poor management and governance that ends up into a collection of web services that is not well-orchestrated, has no service registry, no proper testing, and no management tools. Is SOA starting to show its real ugly face? It is gonna be just another paradigm that fails to deliver what it promises?

Wikipedia describes SOA as an evolution rather than a revolution. It is not a new breakthrough in technology or in paradigm shift, rather it is a compilation of lessons learned from the previous mistakes and tries to come up with best practices on how to fix those mistakes.

SOA is built on standards and governance. That new SOA initiative kicked off in your organization will not deliver concrete result and success unless done with proper management and governance. Business sponsor and SOA Steering Committee play important roles within the organization to make sure that standards are adhered properly and proper governance is in place.

A proper SOA initiative dreams big but starts small. Its goal is comprehensive encompassing the entire IT integration landscape of the organization, but yet it is implemented in manageable chunks iteratively, so that within each iteration, its trajectory can be adjusted according to the ever-changing business requirements. SOA initiative should also co-exist with the existing infrastructure and fits seamlessly with the legacy applications within the organization.

SOA should be an initiative that focuses and sponsored by business while supported by strong technical skills. SOA initiative should be sponsored by key business drivers within the organizations, like LOB heads, top management and other C-level executives. Its trajectory will have to be aligned with business direction driven by business needs. It is not a technical toy that architects can play to show off the latest technical advancement in IT, it should be act as a tool that facilitates business in achieving its goal. Therefore, it is very important for all stake holders in the SOA implementation to understand the strategic goal and the business direction so that implementation can be tailored accordingly. It is a shared responsibility between business and technical leaders of the organization.

SOA is a paradigm, an architecture. Success of its implementation depends largely on the organization doing it. If done right, SOA will definitely deliver all of its promises, and some more.

International Association of Software Architect (IASA) launched its Indonesia Chapter yesterday (May 22nd, 2008) in conjunction with the e-Indonesia Initiative Forum in Jakarta.

Having been involved in IASA Singapore Chapter, I attended the event to see and help with the Indonesian counterpart. The event was officiated by Yang Terhormat Mr. Cahyana Ahmadjayadi, Direktorat Jendral Aplikasi Telematika Indonesia on behalf of Yang Terhormat Prof. Dr. Ir. Mohammad Nuh, DEA, Menteri Komunikasi dan Informatika Republik Indonesia. Keynote speakers in the event include Mr. Aaron Tan Dani, Chairman of IASA Asia Pacific and Mr. Zul Irfan, President of IASA Indonesia. Mr. David Forden from SAP (LinkedIn profile) delivered a presentation about The Role of IT Enterprise Architect.

IASA Indonesia is currently still at an infant stage but it has a lot of promising potential in the future to bring together and contribute to the development of IT in Indonesia, IT architecture in particular. Programs and events from IASA are designed to build and encourage the sharing of knowledge among its members on matters related IT architecture and/or IT in general.

I would like to invite all IT practitioners, IT architects specifically, in the country to join and participate actively in the IASA Indonesia Chapter. For further details on IASA Indonesia Chapter and membership information, please visit http://indonesia.iasahome.org. IASA Global site can be found in http://www.iasahome.org. Let’s join hands and work together in building our knowledge and network around IT architecture in Indonesia.

Living in Singapore as a non-Chinese speaking Chinese descendant has given me a fair amount of inconvenience. Wherever I go, especially if I’m in Chinatown area, people try to speak Chinese with me. I have a fair knowledge of Chinese, but apparently it’s not enough to pick up with the conversation. So I usually reply by: “Do you speak English?”

It’s a common thing where people speak in the language they’re most familiar with. Technical people tend to speak with technical jargons and abbreviations, business people like to talk in business terms. This is a gap that happens in every industry, IT included. If you invite a technical guy to talk about SOA in front of business people, he will come up with technical description about SOA that includes at least 5 IT-specific jargons. This will result in more questions than understanding from the business people.

We need to bridge this gap. SOA is an architecture that helps business becoming more efficient and effective. It offers integration, orchestration and monitoring of IT infrastructure to support business goals. Business has to understand and direct SOA implementation, both business and IT have to work together to form the driving factor of SOA implementation.

As the major aspect of SOA is coarse-grained service composition, business should be shielded from the complexity of IT infrastructure and focus on making business process more efficient in order to generate more revenue for the company. IT has to speak of SOA in a more understandable English, with less IT jargon and better understanding of business domain.

In a recent event held by CTI (http://www.computradetech.com), I tried to explain SOA to a group of journalists from Indonesian media. I find the use of analogy helps a lot in explaining the concept of SOA. It helps non-technical people to get better understanding of the concept of integration, orchestration and monitoring of business processes and what benefits can be gained from implementing them. A recent article from Indonesian local media talks more about the event:

http://www.detikinet.com/index.php/detik.read/tahun/2008/bulan/05/tgl/13/time/182209/idnews/938967/idkanal/319 (the article is in Indonesian)

In short, it’s very important for us to speak and feel comfortable in the same language when we want to get an idea across. Speaking SOA in business terms to business people pretty much analogous to speaking in Chinese to an old Chinese lady selling Barley in People’s Park Center, Chinatown in the manner that we need to speak in a language that both parties understand. Fortunately for me, most Singaporeans speak English well to some extent, so I still can get my idea across although my Chinese is limited .

I was sitting in the McCafe just outside of Shaw House in the corner of Orchard Road and Scotts Road the other day. I was watching the hustle and bustle of business alongside Orchard Road. Being one of the busiest roads in Singapore, Orchard Road is packed with malls, restaurants, hotels, cinemas, shops etc. which provide their services all through the day.

I spotted a couple with their youngster carrying several plastic bags marked with several shop emblems, I figured they might have been around shopping alongside the shopping district. They might have got some groceries in Carrefour, Plaza Singapura, then went to get some clothings in OG, then they might have stopped by for some meals in Orchard Hawker, it must have been a busy day for them, with a well planned itenary they have prepared before they disembarked the train in Dhoby Ghaut MRT station.

Then it just came to me me, the entire Orchard Road business is actually very similar to a gigantic Service Oriented Architecture infrastructure. With each of the merchants act as enterprise applications that provide “services” to the visitors who have a well planned “business process” of what to do there. That itenary of the couple I just spotted can be an instance of a business process that consumes the services of those merchants. and they may have a well planned sequence of how they want to spend their day so they can effectively spend their time during their visit there.

When providing services, these merchants may want to hide the complexities they need to go through to get the goods to their customers. They don’t want to show the complexity of importing them, they only need to show the condition of the goods and put price tags on them. This is analogous to the coarse-grained nature of enterprise services inside a good SOA infrastructure. A service should not be too fined-grain to expose the underlying technical complexities, it should focus on the business functionality instead.

The Orchard Road is the ESB that links the merchants together so they are accessible to the visitors. It’s an important piece of infrastructure the integrates the merchants so that they can do their business conveniently. New merchants can just open up and integrate easily into the infrastructure as long as it follows the standards agreed (e.g. keep things clean, pay the taxes, etc.). In SOA world, new applications can easily plug into the ESB as long as they are SOA-enabled.

There you go, you have an analogy of an ESB and a BPM in Singapore’s busiest shopping district. Looking at it from this angle, the literal description of “Service Oriented Architecture” makes perfect sense. But wait, there’s more to it than just an ESB and a BPM.

In order for the shops to do business, they have to agree on the interface they use. In real life, these interfaces may include an agreed price or the currency to use. In SOA, it may be the Web Service interface. They need to agree on the same WSDL so they can provide services to the business.

Orchard Road is also equipped with a street directory (you can find Orchard map in the Singapore Visitor Center), so that visitors can find where to get certain services they need. This is the job of a Service Registry to list the directory of available services from all of the applications connected to the bus.

The Dhoby Ghaut, Somerset and Orchard MRT stations are triggering points to the business processes. They bring in people to come and shop along the street. In SOA, these triggers can be incoming e-mail, incoming JMS message or a simple Web Service invocation that triggers the business process.

Now, what’s missing? I remember when I was in High School I used spend hours playing a simulation computer game called Transport Tycoon by Chris Sawyer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Tycoon). In the game, I get to run a transportation company that transport people and goods from one city to another. The game provides me with a bird’s eye view of my armada of my busses/trucks/trains/ships etc., so I can tell at any time where they are and how much load they are carrying and business they are generating.

It would be nice to have something like that in our Orchard Road scenario. So if we have one guy who’s supposed to get some clothes from Isetan and should’ve come back more than 3 hours ago, we can track where he is and why he is delayed. Is Isetan running out of clothes he is looking for, or is he merely lost? This is the role of a Business Activity Monitoring, to monitor the condition and health of business processes running in the BPM. BAM should be able to tell the management on the status and the latest snapshot of the corporate business. Many times this information is obtained from running processes inside the BPM.

I sipped my iced Latte and took some mental notes on those analogies I drew from a fine day on Orchard Road. I got this list:

One last sip, then I finished my drink and packed my stuff. I needed to cross the street to get some books from Borders in the Wheelock Place, I needed to “consume” the book store’s service. As the light turned green for the pedestrians, I thought to myself that I wished all SOA infrastructure initiatives can be successful implementations like the bustling and hustling Orchard Road of Singapore. Take care.

I recently celebrated Chinese New Year with my relatives and I talked with some friends about how they celebrated their Chinese New Year with their relatives. The Chinese usually come together to meet at an elder’s house to pay respect to the elder and meet other members of the family. Frequent topic that comes out during the casual chit-chat is usually about how well one has been doing with one’s life so far. Some see this as an opportunity to show how their business has been going well for the past year, some brag about his new marriage is going very sweet and rewarding, some other talk about their children who recently get an award at school. Everybody wants to show how successful his life has been. Everybody needs to feel successful.

Somehow, I kinda reflect these things on an IT project. In a long-running IT project, it is important for the team to feel successful and feel that they are on the right track throughout the project, everybody needs to go home every once in a while with a smile and a peace of mind that he has accomplished his milestone for the day. This is more reason why I evangelize on iteration methodology, not only it helps the project to adapt the project’s trajectory often to accommodate any last-minute-but-extremely-important new business requirements, but these milestones also help the team to understand whether they are on track or not. If they are, they can feel more motivated knowing that they must have done the right thing, if not it gives them a chance to evaluate what’s wrong and rectify any problems they are facing.

The same applies in SOA. Many clients I talk with feel that embarking on an SOA journey is like sailing into the unknown with so many mysteries at sea and it will take a long time before they can see a new land. The manager feels like it’s a long and risky journey with his life (or in this case, his job) is at stake should he fails. The truth is, it doesn’t have to be like that. We can break down the projects into smaller bits, so it is easier for us to swallow. We don’t have to bit off more than we can chew. Take a couple of most critical (or easier, if you need some training ground) business processes and focus on automating those, conquer those before moving on to the next business processes. Integrate a couple or more of the systems required to support and automate the business processes then celebrate your first milestone of the project success. The key is to get started, so we can get the wheel rolling. The secret of getting ahead is getting started.

I would like to quote Zig Ziglar from his book “What I Learned on the Way to the Top":

“Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome”

Perhaps it’s time to change our way of thinking about long journeys (like implementing SOA in our company) and take the first step to make it happen. We don’t have to finish the big SOA project to automate the entire business processes in our company by the time the next Chinese New Year comes, but we can tell our relatives that we have helped automated the marketing and procurement business processes that save the company X amount of money, thus we are entitled to a promotion and we can drive in a new shiny sedan parked just outside. Now, that’s a success in motion.

And lastly, I would like to wish anyone in this blog a warm “Happy Chinese New Year"! May the New Year bring us all a lot of happiness, prosperity and joy. Gong Xi Fa Chai.

SOA initiative involves a great deal of investment for companies truly want to venture into it. The good solutions and expertise required to implement a successful SOA project are costly and sometimes rare to find.

Many vendors may claim that they can do SOA, but they may come without real-life and sufficient experience implementing it. This may pose a great risk towards the project success. SOA is more than just connecting legacy applications through WSDL, it involves solid methodology and proper execution of the entire spectrum which extends from proper ROI analysis, business analysis, service discovery, SOA governance, implementation to deployment and system maintenance.

Provided with proper solution and solid expertise and experience to run it, the investment involved may look small compared to the return that business will enjoy from successful SOA implementation, but IT managers often face with problems justifying the investment to the management in the beginning.

Proper ROI analysis and justification are essential towards convincing the management that the investment made will have its return within measurable amount of time. IT managers also face the challenges of choosing the best suited solution and engaging the right SOA consulting company that can help to drive the project in the right direction.

I would like to ask everybody in this blog to share their experience in managing an SOA project from initial ROI justification to go-live and system maintenance.

Oracle to acquire BEA Systems

With Oracle acquisition of BEA Systems, there’s a major change in SOA solution provider political map. What once are competitors in SOA solution provider landscape now joint under one umbrella, the mighty Oracle. BEA’s strong hold on Telco industry will strengthen Oracle’s grip over that sector.

What will happen to BEA AquaLogic product line after the acquisition? As Larry Ellison puts it, BEA and Oracle solutions will co-exist and integrated, instead of merged. Will Oracle be competing with itself when marketing either e.g. Oracle BPEL PM vs. BEA AquaLogic BPM?