Todd Biske: Outside the Box

Presenter: Daniel Sholler

It’s Tuesday morning, and I’m attending this one over breakfast. He’s just made an interesting comment regarding companies, using the insurance industry as an example. He stated that while most insurance company provide the same services, they differentiate based on how they organize. I was hoping he’d take this further and talk about how organization impacts SOA adoption, but no luck.

Another comment he made is that Gartner sees a correlation between companies that succeed with SOA and companies that have mature identity management practices. If identity can’t flow through all of your service interactions, you’re going to run into problems. I agree with that.

On to standards. He has another slide up that shows the different types of relationships an organization may have. At the bottom, a completely internal interaction relies on a private subset of information and process models. In the middle, a company talking to a partner has a closed agreement that defines them. At the top, a company interacting with a “cloud” service has an open agreement. Anyone interacting with the cloud can see the information and process models available. He’s then gone on to show how their is a spectrum of standards that one must be concerned with. Once again, no arguments here.