I spent much of the second day talking with attendees, speakers, and SYS-CON staff about SOA, virtualization, and the conference in general. Overall, there was a general sentiment that the conference was a success and had some valuable content. One presentation from the day that really stood out was a case study from the banking industry — Delivering Big Bank Solutions with Community Banking Intimacy. The bank is Synovus, a regional bank in the southeastern part of the US with about 33 billion in assets spread across multiple lines of business (banking, financial management, brokerage, insurance, and more).

In a thick southern, ‘good ole boy’ style delivery, the speakers from Synovus described their approach as ‘Blue Collar SOA’, explaining: “…it may not be perty, but it works and we get a lot of value out of it.” The Synovus representatives went on to explain that while they did not set out to deploy a SOA solution, their business requirements and technology objectives led them in that direction. They went on to describe several keys to successful SOA adoption, including the following:

• Define and document a set of guiding principles
• Define and document a reference architecture that is consistent with those principles
• Identify standards, technologies, and products that can enable that architecture and communicate and manage this through governance
• Identify a business visible pilot project to convert the strategy and reference architecture into a real implementation
• Define and enforce the implementation strategy through governance processes
• Employ governance toolsets to validate services against guiding principles as well as policies and SLAs

The results of their SOA adoption as well as the importance of service orchestration is outlined in a white paper from Active Endpoints (their service orchestration partner).

The presenters concluded by identifying a huge list of lessons learned. Three things really stood out to me on that list:

1. Identify and document standards and best practices and enforce them through your governance processes
2. SOA changes your team dynamics — you will need more documenters than developers
3. Education is key because SOA is hard

That third one was especially of interest to me given Web Age’s focus upon SOA education. In the Q&A portion I asked for the folks from Synovus to elaborate on the education topic. They were eager to explain that they had discovered a huge gap between legacy skill sets and what it takes to be successful with SOA. They had to figure out how to translate those skills, bring people up to speed on new methodologies and terminologies and get people to think differently about how to solve problems. Synovus also discovered that considerable education and mentoring was necessary to help the leadership that direct their lines of business to “think outside their silo”. Amen!

At Web Age we have seen the same sorts of challenges and often discover that teaching the technologies is fairly simple. Teaching the methodologies is more difficult. Teaching the new mindset (e.g. ‘thinking outside the silo’) and providing business users with new tools and techniques for solving problems is even more difficult. So what is the most challenging? Getting organizations to actually change once they are educated. The technology side of SOA is relatively easy. The human side is where things get tricky.

Overall, the conference was a great experience. If you get a chance to catch the East coast or West coast shows next year, definitely go. I hope to see you there!

A common theme that I have come across in working with various clients in the initial stages of SOA adoption, is an interest in case studies. It seems that the significant paradigm shift required by SOA leads to a need for real-world illustrations of how others have employed SOA in order to spark their own thoughts on how to leverage it. To that end, I have created a page designated to compiling SOA case studies. At some point, I’ll also try and see if I can talk one or more of my clients into collaborating on a case study to add to the list (a few of them have already been documented elsewhere).