And the Walls Come Tumbling Down Wisconsin

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Originally published at Internet.com

The walls need to come down.

Leading-edge CIOs and CTOs say they're tired of having artificial barriers exist between SOA, BPM, Six Sigma, lean, application development and all the other practices that are about capturing business processes, making them more efficient, and reusing them. The message they want to see get out - both to their peers and to the vendors - is that these are all intertwined and related, and that organizations shouldn't think they must choose between them.

That was one of the most important outcomes of the first SOA Consortium face-to-face membership meeting held in San Diego this week, says consortium executive director Richard Soley, who also is chairman and CEO of the Object Management Group.

Participants at the meeting already have been through implementing SOA in their organizations, and they're concerned that their peers who haven't progressed that far may not understand how critical it is to connect all those practices as they move to become services-based businesses. And the vendor community isn't necessarily helping to clear things up for them.

"They felt that some of the vendors are trying to sell them separate SOA, lean and BPM products, and that doesn't solve their problems," says Soley. "And they felt that some analysts are explaining them as different things when they are not."

As an example, says Soley, "Your application development strategy had better be driven by your SOA strategy, or you'll wind up building monolithic applications again. Anyone who artificially separates those into different categories - espeically of technology - completely misses the point."

But today, there exists in many organizations "bottlenecks of centers of excellence. You get organizations that build them, and then everything has to go through them and nothing ever gets done," says Soley. "And worse, if you have BPM and SOA as separate centers of excellence, they compete for the attention of the people who have to make decisions and manage business processes. And if you do that, you have a mess."

Methodology Mania

One of the goals to come out of the meeting was the need to focus on delivering the best-practice data, case studies and other information that will help organizations support building an SOA architecture using the methodologies that are germane to their organization.

"If you look at the field today, there are so many methodologies to look at - ITIL, the black belts and Six Sigma, CMMI, and several maturity models - and all have something to say to help you build a service-oriented architecture," says Soley.

If an organization has Six Sigma black belts on staff, it's to their benefit to learn from others who've been there how to implement SOA using those people's expertise - and what mistakes not to make.

At its meeting, the Consortium also redefined its constituencies to include not just CIOs, who can explain the value of using SOA to structure the business to C-level business execs, and enterprise architects, who can advocate to the project managers and product developers, but also business process owners.

"They too need to understand the value of the SOA approach, and that there is a shared language for business processes across the organization," Soley says.

The organization now also plans quarterly executive summits for members, with the next one scheduled for June in Brussels.

Can they effect the large changes that need to be made by organizations to help SOA rise above the technologies associated with it, to become the business practice for achieving agility?

"The value of community is tremendously high," says Soley. "You get the right core of people together and you can make a pretty large impact."