The South East Asia SOA Weblog

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 .