Strategy Sessions

Managing Enterprise Architecture through Dependencies

Neeraj Sangal, President - Lattix

To understand enterprise architecture you must understand disparate systems and how they relate to each other. How often have we seen that a small innocuous change can bring down a well-running, mission-critical system? You make a small change to a stored procedure in a database, and suddenly some applications don’t work correctly. We will present a highly scalable approach that utilizes intermodule dependencies to represent and visualize the architecture of complex systems. This technique utilizes a dependency structure matrix (DSM) for its representation. The elements of enterprise architecture include databases, services, applications, and a myriad of configuration files. We will present a technique that allows you to understand the dependencies not just within individual applications and databases but also provides a way to see how they are related to each other. We will show how this approach highlights architectural weaknesses and how changes can propagate within the system.

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The Role of Policy in Service-Oriented Architecture

Toufic Boubez, CTO - Layer 7 Technologies

The original goal of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) concept and its implementation technologies such as Web services, was to build flexible, loosely coupled systems. However, any two components in a system that communicate with each other are coupled to a certain extent. As architects, our aim in deploying real-world SOAs is to diminish that coupling between components, which means removing or diminishing the run-time dependencies between them. One of the best, if overused, examples of loosely coupled systems is the way the Web works today. Routing, DNS, cookies, SSL handshakes, authentication, redirection, and so on are all handled by the infrastructure at runtime. Only a URL is typically required. Although this description is a slight simplification, it nevertheless provides a powerful example that shouldn't be ignored. The best mechanism to achieve loose coupling between SOA components is to delegate as much of the run-time tasks as possible to the infrastructure. For this approach to work, contracts, requirements, and capabilities need to be defined and automated through a declarative, configurable, and manageable mechanism. Currently, WSDL is viewed as the contract language for Web services, but it is far from adequate as a contract language for SOA. The required level of abstraction for SOA sits at the policy level. Policies contain assertions about the operational interfaces for components in an SOA. These assertions include credential preferences, authentication and authorization mechanisms, signature and encryption preferences, identity sources, routing, transformations, versioning, reliable messaging and others. This discussion will introduce the concept of policy, describe its role in real-world SOA, introduce the W3C WS-Policy framework specification, and give WS-Policy usage examples as well as discuss the capabilities and limitations of the specification.

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Service-Oriented Architecture: Evolving the Development Environment

Chris Haddad, Director of Architecture Services - Burton Group

As service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure products, infrastructure services, and Web service standards continue to mature, technical impediments to achieving SOA success recede. Architects are aligning software development life-cycle governance with SOA principles. Changing existing processes, culture, and incentives is a nontrivial task. This presentation will review the current state of the WS-* specifications, SOA infrastructure products, and emerging service design practices. Chris will present the challenges faced when organizations evolve their development environment to embrace services, and how organizations are solving the issues by incorporating SOA governance products and best practices into existing development and project-management processes.

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SOA Quality: It’s Not Just About Testing Web Services

Frank Grossman, CTO of Mindreef, Inc.

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Collaborative Governance: Social Networking for Service-Oriented Architecture

Frank Martinez, Executive Vice President, Product Strategy - SOA Software

Organizations introducing service-orientation as a computing theme formally supported through enterprise architecture are incurring several obstacles. Service-orientation promotes the sharing of capabilities across traditional enterprise system, information, and application boundaries. Accordingly, the sharing of these capabilities—and the organizational competencies required to support them—require that we transcend the behavioral boundaries of people, process, and organization. This type of change results in the introduction of new artifacts, workstreams, policies, and processes. These changes can be supported effectively by governance automation systems. Nonetheless, the hardest thing to change in most organizations is behavior, and this obstacle is the essence of the governance challenge associated with introducing an enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA) program and service-orientation as the primary computing theme supported by the program... to dictate or collaborate. Collaborative governance introduces a model that is inherently aligned with the very essence of how we define governance... "ensuring desired behavior." Collaborative governance is the social network for the SOA program. In this session we will review how we can reduce friction and manage the organizational change associated with the introduction of an enterprise SOA program and the common governance models that are emerging. We will also discuss how the discipline of enterprise architecture governance is being applied to SOA and provide an overview of how governance automation systems are evolving to support the "socialization of service-orientation" through an "early cycle" governance model and "closed-loop SOA infrastructure."

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The New SOA Synergy: How Run-Time Governance, Triage, and Security Must Work Together

Paul Lipton, Senior Architect - Wily Technology Division/BSO, CA Ince

Consider how the unique architectural characteristics of SOA can be a two-edged sword affecting the requirements, nature, and success of many important aspects of SOA, especially run-time governance and security. For example, SOA services can be vulnerable to accidental or deliberate denial-of-service attacks resulting in costly, service-level failures. How do you understand the nature of these and other problems that can severely impact the performance and reliability of the run-time SOA environment? The success of any SOA project requires that one must gain an understanding of the true nature, performance characteristics, and availability of the business transactions that flow in real time through highly-distributed services and their supporting IT infrastructure. Only the synergy of transaction-oriented, operational, and security management can achieve adequate visibility into such problems before they grow serious. This session will discuss best practices related to both to prepare you to deliver a verifiably reliable and successful SOA and can effectively triage SOA business transaction failures and risks in real time.

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Beyond Blueprints: From Vision to Value with Service-Oriented Architecture Governance

Charles Stack, Vice President Engineering - BEA Systems

Without proper governance, enterprise architecture is a wish list, and IT investment is a lottery. As companies continue the mass migration to service-oriented architecture (SOA), effective governance becomes increasingly important in keeping SOA’s loosely coupled services tightly coupled to the business. However, SOA is both a cultural and a technological shift, and its success in delivering greater reuse and agility depends on a governance framework that effectively communicates the architectural vision to all stakeholders, and translates that vision into value. That process is what good governance is all about, and that takes more than static documents and governance by memo. This presentation will provide a 360-degree view of SOA, with a focus on the people, practices, and technologies required for effective SOA governance. Attendees will learn how to apply governance throughout the SOA life cycle, how to facilitate reuse to reduce complexity, and key organizational practices for keeping SOA aligned with architecture and business goals.

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Scaling Enterprise SOA Deployments: The Benefits of a Service-Grid Architecture

Madhav Vodnala, Senior Solutions Architect - Fiorano Software

The first wave of integrating storage, compute, and networking hardware helped businesses move from client/server to Internet-based, peer-to-peer networks. A second wave of integrating applications on top of the hardware infrastructure promised to deliver unprecedented economies of scale. In today’s enterprise IT model, applications exposed as services need to be integrated seamlessly with other applications distributed across the network to generate the best operational efficiencies. Messaging-oriented middleware is at the heart of enabling such a frictionless integration between a business’ core assets—its applications and data residing on the network. However, integrating multivendor applications with diverse infrastructure and legacy applications is a daunting task. In a recent report a leading analyst maintained that Global 3500 firms will spend an average of $6.4 million in 2007 on service-oriented integration and process management budgets, and less than 35 percent of the projects come in on time and on budget. Why are service-oriented architecture (SOA) project schedules so unpredictable? Incumbent first-generation SOA solutions consist of a patchwork of point products that are struggling to meet the performance, scalability, flexibility, and security demanded by modern distributed business systems. In contrast to an age of irrational exuberance, throwing more hardware and customized software at the problem is no longer a viable option for most businesses.

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Business Intelligence for IT

Bill Cason, Chief Technology Officer - Troux Technologies

Tangible business advantages are fleeting at best In today’s world. Repeatable success depends largely on the ability to adjust your course faster than your competition. Understanding exactly which adjustments need to be made is a prerequisite for such course correction. In the business world the means to that end is Business Intelligence (BI). Quite simply, BI is the creation of intelligence about how well the business is working. Unfortunately, the CIO’s organization is itself seldom considered an equal as a real business unit. While IT groups are generally responsible for bringing BI to the rest of the corporation, they are often the last in line to reap any of the benefits themselves. BI, however, is not just for everyone else. BI for IT, often using enterprise architecture (EA) efforts as a foundation, optimizes IT’s business processes and initiatives and helps align IT with corporate business objectives. The potential uses of BI technology within the CIO’s organization are numerous: cost optimization, asset maximization, life-cycle management, service delivery, impact analysis, gap analysis, as-is/to-be transformations, and so on. Such BI analytics should be an integral part of the CIO’s EA dashboard.

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