Todd Biske: Outside the Box

Archive for April, 2009

People who have worked with me know that I’m somewhat passionate about having a well-defined engagement model. More often than not, I think we’ve created challenges for ourselves due to poorly-defined engagement models. The engagement model normally consists of “Talk to Person A” or “Talk to Team B” which means that you’re going to get a different result every time. It also means that interaction is going to be different, because no one is going to come to Person A or Team B with the same set of information, so the engagement is likely to evolve over time. In some cases, this is fine. If you’re part of your engagement model is to provide mentoring in a particular domain, then you need to recognize that the structure of the engagement will likely be time-based rather than information-based, at least in terms of the cost. Think of it as the difference between a fixed-cost standard offering, and a variable cost (usually based on time) from a consulting firm. I frequently recommend that teams try to express their service offerings in this manner, especially when involved in the project estimation process. Define what services should be fixed cost and define what services are variable cost, and what that variance depends on. This should be part of the process for operationalizing a service, and someone should be reviewing the team’s effort to make sure they’ve thought about these concerns.

When thinking about your services in the ITSM sense, it’s good to create a well-defined interface, just as we do in the web service sense. Think about how other teams will interact with your services. In some cases, it may be an asynchronous interaction via artifacts. An EA team may produce reference models, patterns, etc. for other teams to use in their projects. These artifacts are designed in their own timeline, separate from any project, and projects can access them at will. Requests to update them based on new information go into a queue and are executed according to the priority of the EA manager. On the other hand, an architecture review is executed synchronously, with a project team making a request for a review, provided they have the required inputs (an architectural specification, in most cases), with the output being the recommendations of the reviewer, and possibly a formal approval to proceed forward (or not).

If you’re providing infrastructure services, such as new servers, or configuration of load balancers, etc., in addition to the project-based interactions, you must also think about what your services are at run-time. While most teams include troubleshooting services, sometimes the interface is lacking definition. In addition, run-time services need to go beyond troubleshooting. When the dashboard lights are all green, what services do you provide? Do you provide reports to the customers of your services? There’s a wealth of information to be learned by observing the behavior of the system when things are going well, and that information can lead to service improvements, whether yours or someone else’s. Think about this when you’re defining your service.

Well, I have to hold true to my bet with Leo de Sousa. Congratulations to the Vancouver Canucks on sweeping my St. Louis Blues in the first round of the playoffs. They actually played very well, and I’d rather see them win than either Detroit or San Jose, so go Canucks. Now I can go back to paying attention to the St. Louis Cardinals (who came back from 4-0 down today to beat the Mets 6-4), and thankfully, Vancouver doesn’t have a major league baseball team.

I had a brief conversation with Nick Gall (Twitter: ironick) of Gartner on Twitter regarding designing for change. Back in the early days of SOA, I’m pretty sure that I first heard the phrase, “we need to build things to change” from a Gartner analyst, although I don’t recall which one. Since that time, there’s been a lot of discussion on the subject of designing/building for change, usually tied to a discussion on REST versus WS-*. Yesterday, I stepped back from the debate and thought, “Can we ever design for change, and is that really the right problem?”

As I told Nick, technology and design choices can certain constrain the flexibility that you have. Think about the office building that many of us work in. There was a time when they weren’t big farms of cubicle and they actually had real walls and doors. Did this design work? Yes. Was it flexible enough to meet the needs of an expanding work force? No. I couldn’t easily and quickly create new conference rooms, change the size of spaces, etc. Did it meet all possible changes the company would go through? No. Did the planners ever think that every cubicle would consume the amount of electricity they do today? What about wiring for the Internet? Sometimes those buildings need to be renovated or even bulldozed. The same thing is true on the technology side. We made some design decisions that worked and were flexibility, yet not flexible enough for the change that could not have been easily predicted in most companies, such as the advent of the internet.

Maybe I’m getting wiser as I go through more of these technology changes, but for me, the fundamental problem is not the technology selection. Yes, poor design and technology selection can be limiting, but I think the bigger problem is that we have poor processes for determining what changes are definitely coming, what changes might be coming, and how and when to incorporate those changes into what IT does, despite the available predictions from the various analysts. Instead, we have a reactive, project-driven approach without any sort of portfolio planning and management expertise. To this, I’m reminded of a thought I had while sitting in a Gartner talk on application and project portfolio management a year or two ago. If I’m sitting in a similar session on service portfolio management 5 years from now, we’ve missed the boat and we still don’t get it. Develop a process for change, and it well help you make good, timely design choices. The process for change involves sound portfolio management and rationalization processes.

Fellow Twitterer Leo de Sousa posted a review of my book, SOA Governance, on his blog. Leo is an Enterprise Architect at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, and is leveraging the book on their journey in adopting SOA. Thanks for the review, Leo. I’m glad you posted it before the Stanley Cup playoffs begin as my St. Louis Blues will be taking on your Vancouver Canucks, and I wouldn’t have wanted the upcoming Blues victory to taint your review!

I recorded a podcast on various SOA Governance topics with Bob Rhubart, Cathy Lippert, and Sharon Fay of Oracle as part of Oracle’s Arch2Arch Podcast series. You can listen to part one via this link, or you can find it at Oracle’s ArchBeat site here.