Lustratus LiteBytes

Archive for January, 2008

One of the forecasts in the Lustratus predictions for 2008 Insight, available free of charge from the Lustratus web store, deals with the emergence and adoption of mashups.

At this moment it is unlcear how fast mashups will be adopted, but Lustratus thinks that any serious adoption will place massive strain on enterprise infrastructures, causing the unwary to buckle and collapse.

Mashups seem great. The user is suddenly in a position to create his or her own page layout with all the business applications needed to carry out this user’s activities. A great productivity boost, perhaps, but what are the impacts on the enterprise? Basically, as Lustratus points out, every desktop becomes an application. Instead of an IT department having to worry about 10 or 20 applications, all of a sudden there are 100s or even 1000s. Worse still, while traditional IT-controlled applications are usually controlled fairly rigorously with procedures, policies and management practices, the world of mashups could well be more akin to anarchy.

Fundamental to a productive mashup will be the need to drive the different business services required by the particular user, and therefore services will suddenly become tools used by hundreds in many different ways. All of this activity could create huge traffic increase as well as a generally uncoordinated style of operations, causing major difficulties for the infrastructure software trying to hold everything together.

Well, OK, maybe this is a little negative – but the point is, enterprise architects and management should start considering these issues now. Trying to sort this out when the genie is out of the bottle will be a lot more difficult…..

Steve

During a nice break for the Holidays, I got to thinking about SOA and its similarities to communism, and on my return I have been chatting to a number of SOA users and have confirmed my suspicions. SOA is just a communist plot!

Seriously though, there is a real issue here that is starting to affect companies as SOA penetration increases. Once upon a time, IT investment was funded primarily through a central IT budget with all business units having to share the burden, but over the years this became unacceptable to many who wanted a more capitalist view where funds came from the people generating the business and were justified based on returns. So nowadays IT budgets typically fall into two pieces; a central component for the IT ‘infrastructure’ that everyone shares, and project-based funding attached to specific business initiatives.

Then along comes SOA. In its simplest terms, SOA is about two things – packaging functionality in business services, and encouraging the sharing of these services across different business needs. But who owns these services / is responsible for funding them? Are they infrastructure? Well, not really because they are business-driven. So are they funded by a project? But in that case the project is now having to fund something being done ‘for the good of the whole’.

This problem can be seen more clearly if we look forward. Imagine a company where SOA has become a way of life, and all applications are now made up of shared SOA services linked in different ways. Does that mean everything is now infrastructure and should be centrally funded? Then that takes us back to the centralized funding days, losing the link between business need/return and targeted investment. In reality, this introduces the principles of communism, where everyone owns everything, and the problem for companies is that this model stifles business performance and progress. Perhaps one way around the problem is for monitoring and management software to keep pace with the changes, so a clear picture can be built of which business operations drive which services. At least this would provide some more granular level of investment/return linkage.

However, my personal view is the problem will sort itself out – once the initial funding hurdle of SOA has been overcome, project funding to achieve a particular business end will be happy to build the required functionality in ‘SOA mode’ because it will be just as cheap as not doing this, and this will have the convenient by-product of helping other projects. In other words, the kick-back against SOA by projects today is based on being forced to increase investment ‘for the good of others’. If SOA works out right, the future should see projects tomorrow investing less but also seeing others benefit, a much more palatable situation.

Steve