Primitive man and woman were forced to adapt to their environment to survive. Animal hides for clothes, crude weapons and tools made out of stone or bone, and roots or berries for food (perhaps sabertooth steak or terradactyl ribs if company is coming over). Eventually, some nearby tribe discovers fire, but reports of fire-related injuries and property destruction lead our cave dwellers to avoid this new magic. These primitive humans are doing fine with their current capabilities and they are able to meet their basic needs without dabbling with such things. Over time the nearby tribe’s use of fire expands and one very enterprising woman invents pit fired pottery. The more primitive people have heard and seen the potential of this new breakthrough and are interested in using it. Alas, the obstacles to adopting this innovation are not trivial. They must learn how to create fire, handle fire cautiously, locate and stockpile flint and tender, develop fireproof tools, create fire pits, learn to craft with clay and finally develop a process to fire the clay pots successfully. Lack of education, skills, infrastructure, resources, and processes hinder their ability to progress. Perhaps the greatest barrier for these primitive people is fear of the unknown and risk of failure. Thousands of years later, we are faced with the same technology adoption challenges — education, skills, infrastructure, resources, processes, and fear.

Modernizing legacy information systems is not unlike the modernization efforts that have occurred for thousands of years. In fact, legacy or heritage systems are often referred to as ‘dinosaurs’. Correspondingly, the same types of obstacles must be overcome:

• Education — There is a mindset shift that must take place to understand the service oriented way of thinking. At first glance, services are just fancy objects. The reality is that service orientation requires a much broader, end-to-end view of the enterprise, complete with process-centric alignment, layered architecture, contracted interfaces, standards-based connectivity, and full life cycle governance. I have blogged about the alignment of service orientation and the unique qualities of SOA before. Also, David Ing has some interesting thoughts on service orientation.
• Skills — A well documented skills gap exists around service orientation. Joe McKendrick sites it as one of the two things killing SOA in 2008 and the guys over at ZapThink have been alerting the industry to the dangerous SOA skills gap for quite some time. Why is this? Service orientation skills cannot be acquired by attending a conference or reading a book (although I do have a book that I HIGHLY recommend). Academic learning as well as hands-on mentoring is required. Moreover, there are nuances to effective service orientation, service design, process alignment, and enterprise governance that require time and experience to develop. There are new technologies, design patterns, techniques, and methodologies that must be introduced and ultimately absorbed. This will require instructor-led training, research, hands-on mentoring, and practical experience to develop proficiency in these areas.
• Infrastructure — Contrary to popular belief, a service oriented infrastructure cannot be achieved by purchasing an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) from a vendor and adding water. There are, in fact, a variety of infrastructure elements (service registry/repository, governance suite, business process engine, policy manager, policy enforcer, and etc.). There is a great little SOA infrastructure white paper that a consortium of vendors put together a while back. Additionally, be sure to avoid the trap of assuming that you need to have your SOA infrastructure fully mature on day one. Eric Newcomer has a great post from a couple years back regarding an incremental adoption of SOA infrastructure.
• Resources – There are several ways to slice the resource issue. For effective adoption of SOA, you will need a pool of human resources (with appropriate education and skills), technical resources (infrastructure, knowledge management and collaboration tools, as well as design and development tools), and you will need expert resources (developed in-house, or brought in from an outside source initially).
• Processes — All the education, skills, infrastructure, and resources in the world won’t amount to a hill of Java beans without effective processes for governing the adoption of service orientation. You will need processes for service selection, service design, quality assurance and testing, policy enforcement, and runtime service management. Effective governance can make or break your adoption of SOA. I have blogged on the importance of service oriented governance numerous times.
• Fear – People fear change. Service orientation appears threatening to many people at first due to the changes required in adopting it. New patterns of thinking are required around how to solve customer problems. Skills must be adapted, other skills developed from scratch. New infrastructure and resource pools must be created and processes must be adapted and new processes created. These changes can be intimidating. A considerable degree of people change management must be accepted as a part of a successful transition toward service orientation.

Service orientation adoption is challenging in its own right. It becomes increasingly challenging when you factor in the dinosaurs that must be modernized as a part of the adoption process. Immediately, questions begin to arise:

• What systems and/or business processes should be modernized?
• Should we migrate, expose, or leverage our existing legacy assets?
• Should adoption occur within a particular line of business or across the whole of the enterprise?
• How will modernization impact existing teams and project roles?

These questions and many more must be explored as part of the adoption of service orientation. I explored several of these topics in a recent public webinar - Enterprise Modernization and SOA Concepts (pdf).

Another resource you might consider is a new course that Web Age has been offering since April of this year. It is a two-day workshop that explores the modernization of legacy applications, SOA concepts, modernization challenges and risks, and various strategies for modernizing legacy systems. It is aimed at team leads, architects, managers, and legacy application support personnel. For more details, check out the course details - WA1657 Application Modernization and SOA Concepts.

Adopting service orientation and “moving out of the Stone Age” is not a simple task. It requires intentional allocation of time, energy, and resources. It cannot and should not be approached in an ad-hoc fashion. Technology adoption has always been challenging, just like when ancient man and woman adopted fire. When it comes to service orientation, be sure that you work through the necessary steps of adopting education, skills, infrastructure, resources, processes, and addressing the fear factor. Otherwise, you just might get burned.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been focusing quite a bit on helping people think about how much SOA they really need to address their business objectives. It turns out that you can, in fact, have too much of a good thing.

In November, I spoke at SOAWorld in San Francisco: “A Little SOA Goes A Long Way”. Then in December, I was interviewed by Jason Bloomberg and David Linthicum of ZapThink fame: “How Much SOA Do You Need?”. The presentation is available as a video webcast and the interview is available as an audio podcast.

“A Little SOA Goes A Long Way” (video webcast)

“How Much SOA Do You Need?” (audio podcast)

Additionally, my upcoming book (Wiley Press, Spring 2008) devotes an entire chapter to the subject of right-sizing SOA.

Have any experiences to share regarding how much SOA is just right and/or too much? Feel free to comment and discuss!

The first day of SOA World 2007 - West went very well. Miko Matsumura with Software AG / webMethods kicked things off with the keynote - Time Oriented Architecture: Evolution by Design? And he had some really entertaining 3-D animation and virtual simulations in his presentation. It was pretty cool. The next presentation in the main room was by Theo Beack from BEA - Virtualized SOA: Adaptive Infrastructure for Demanding Applications.

I delivered the third presentation of the day in the main room - A Little SOA Goes A Long Way, discussing the importance of identifying which aspects of your enterprise are ripe for service orientation and which areas are better left alone. The outline for that presentation is as follows:

• Introduction
• Why SOA initiatives fail
• What my kids taught me about SOA
• Adopting SOA selectively
• Bowling for governance
• Review

This presentation seemed to be well-received and I was particularly pleased with the broad acceptance of the Selective SOA Methodology that I presented. This methodology serves as the cornerstone for much of the SOA Adoption and SOA Governance mentoring that Web Age Solutions provides to clients. If you’d like a copy of the presentation, you can download it here — A Little SOA Goes A Long Way (PDF).

After a trip to the Expo Floor and some snacks, we were back in the main room to hear from Mike Pellegrini from Active Endpoints presenting - Your SOA Needs BPEL For Orchestration. He had some great content, but one nugget really stood out to me early in the presentation. Mike was describing services and processes as two kinds of abstractions that are important in SOA. After discussing them separately, he offered the following synthesis: “Services don’t change often, but they are orchestrated and re-orchestrated fairly often to build/modify business processes.” I like that. I would qualify it to say that services SHOULDN’T change often. In other words, I believe that this is indicative of an enterprise that has reached a considerable degree of maturity in their service orientation. Nonetheless, I thought it was a really solid characterization of services and processes.

Following Mike’s presentation, the speaker that was slated to speak in the main room could not be located. After hunting for about ten minutes, SYS-CON got desperate and accepted my offer to deliver another presentation that I had on my laptop. So I hopped up on stage, grabbed a mic, and fired up my laptop with the same presentation that I had delivered at SOAWorld in June early this year in New York - Service Oriented Patterns and Anti-Patterns. Fortunately, I had delivered that presentation about a month ago for a users group in Dallas, so I wasn’t completely unfamiliar with the material. I was a little rushed for time due to the late start, but overall that presentation went rather well.

After a lunch break, Ian Thain of Sybase presented - Model-driven SOA. His presentation included some interesting demonstrations of model-driven SOA using Sybase tools. Next was another Expo Floor break and snacks, followed by the SOA Power Panel.

I had the pleasure of participating on the SOA Power Panel along with Miko Matsumura (Software AG / webMethods), Kevin Hakman (TIBCO), and Sandy Zylka (NextAxiom). Jeremy Geelan moderated and we had some great discussion around SOA, convergence with other trends, economic impacts, and more. The panel session was recorded and I will post a link to it once it is made available.

I don’t know what happened for the rest of the day as I was occupied by various discussions in the late afternoon and then in a bit of sight-seeing in the evening (Coit Tower, Treasure Island, Lombard Street, and more).