LiteBytes from Lustratus Research

SOA and its effects on Business Risk

SOA is a Big Thing - it transforms the business, it is a key strategic initiative, it aligns IT more closely with business goals, etc.  But this brings up an important issue for executives. How does SOA affect the business risk picture? Does it drive additional risks? Does it provide any mitigation?

Lustratus has just published a new paper, "The Impact of SOA on Business Risk", that looks at this subject in more detail. The paper does not try to come up with a definitive answer, but instead considers the strategic, compliance, financial and operational areas of business risk and comes up with a grid of effects generated by SOA adoption, providing a framework against which companies can carry out their own risk assessments.

I believe this is an important area for companies to be aware of, with little guidance available. Bearing this in mind, Lustratus has decided to make the paper available at no charge. But for those people who cannot take the time to read the whole paper, the broad conclusion is that although there are areas where SOA drives risk, on balance it mitigates considerably more risk than it drives, and on top of this the new exposures are largely manageable.

Steve 

Trouble with evaluating SOA ROI

I was trying to think how to get another TLA in that title, since I think you get a prize for having three three-letter-acronyms in a row. However, the topic is definitely getting a lot of attention as companies try to decide whether SOA is worth the effort. The problem is, SOA benefits span a wide range, and are often difficult to assess. And yet, as John Soat notes in Information Week, real customers are showing major gains with SOA.

My take is that it is important to sort benefits into a spectrum of tangibleness (if such a word exists). So, reducing redundancy should have an actual dollar value reduction in maintenance costs - a tangible number. Delivering the agility to deal with new regulations more quickly is difficult to estimate in dollar terms, but could even be a survival issue. Seems to me the key is to find a way to include the full range of elements in any justification or evaluation.

Perhaps one way to add a dollar value benefit on some of the intangible benefits is to ask the executive in charge of the area most affected how much they would be prepared to pay to solve the issue. So, it might be interesting to ask the CFO how much he would invest to ensure the company could comply with new regulations within the assigned deadlines. This, then, becomes a tangible number that can be plugged into the case.

Steve

IBM's Information on Demand streamroller gains speed with the Princeton Softech acquisition

IBM announced the completion of its acquisition of Princeton Softech - a company which focused on data archiving, classification and discovery software.  All of which sounds quite specialist until it is put into the context of IBM's Information on Demand (IoD) strategy.  Back in March, Ambuj Hoyal, who heads us IBM's Information Management division (with responsibility for the Information on Demand strategy) explained:

"... an inflection point occurred in 1996 when there were many techniques to create Web sites or do Web-based business... We are at a similar inflection point in 2006. We have myriads of techniques – metadata management, ETL (extraction, transformation, and loading) tools, data creation tools, Federation tools, cleansing tools, profiling tools. People use these tools to solve the information challenge."

To translate, IBM see a huge opportunity and are putting serious money into it - this acquisition is the latest of 21 which are part of this strategy (to see the list go here).  The opportunity is to build an information management platform which allows organisations to create, maintain and (most importantly) extract value from the myriad of data sources which flow around the enterprise.  Data cleansing, data distribution, data integration and master data management (among other areas) are each expensive activities but often have clear budget and value associated with them - this even before getting to semi-structured information which is also with the Information on Demand remit.  While there are best of breed solutions to different parts of the puzzle, there aren't single integrated solutions - which is what IBM hopes to offer.  Interestingly, IBM has yet to move on Business Intelligence vendors - it appears to have correctly realised that the major task is not creating dashboards; it is ensuring that what goes into the dashboards is correct and timely. 

Any familar with the area of enterprise data management will realise that the challenges inherent in building and deploying such a platform are formidible.  At a recent briefing IBM gave Lustratus, the whole area of data governance in particular was highlighted:  how do you organise structures and responsibilities to ensure that coherent and consistent data definitions can be used and reused through the enterprise (this should sound very familiar to anybody involved in SOA - just switch the word service for data!).  To figure out how to do this right IBM set up the Data Governance Council back in 2005 with many leading financial services and telecoms companies (among others).

Yet again getting into detail is beyond the scope of a normal blog - but I would recommend anybody with a passing interest in BI (or indeed enterprise architectures) to take a look at IBM's web-site on Information on Demand. Of course the strategy is not without obvious challenges:  The technology is from many different sources (even if it now all belongs to IBM) and there is a significant amount of complexity associated with solving such a complex problem.  Also, when there isn't a significant regulatory stick (Basel II for instance), I imagine it could be very hard to sell at a strategic level.  This is because while there are clearly valuable uses of Information on Demand, but there seems to be no common theme around which business momentum can be built.  And finally, its association with the term business intelligence may well go against it - already some analysts are wondering where IBM's query tools will stack up against Business Objects et al (not a relevant question as BO and others will sit on top of IoD) and in many cases the proposition is operational efficiency or regulatory compliance, not (to my mind at least) classic BI.

Ronan

Use a hot-house to get better productivity

I was keynoting at the DeutschePost SOA Days technical seminar held in Bonn, Germany last week, and while I was waiting to present I sat through a very informative presentation from a large telecoms company about its efforts with SOA. However, one point that really caught my attention was the fact that the company has had some success with improving productivity through focusing on 90-day cycles. This extremely challenging timeframe is assisted greatly by the SOA approach used by the company, but a key element is that new projects start off life with a 'hot-house' activity.

The idea is to gather the core team of people involved in the project in one room, for however long is required, to spec out the project and select the implementation approach. This looks at the business and IT requirements and implications. What I love is that this 'hot-house' is carried out in a special room where there is only local networking available (no internet or email), and it even has mobile phone jammers to block calls. Results appear to have been extremely impressive. The hot-house sets the scene for a rapid development effort. Admittedly not every 90-day cycle completes the project - it can determine that another cycle is needed for additional research for example, but project delivery has definitely speeded up.

As for me, I just want one of those mobile phone jammers - I would love to take one on the train, and turn it on intermittently.....

Steve