Innovating beyond the enterprise
Stuart Charlton's Blog |
June 21, 2007 8:01 AM
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Comments (3)
So, this is my first BEA blog entry. I've been on Stu Says Stuff for several years, where I put most of my partially baked commentary, but this will be where I discuss my more BEA-oriented ideas.
June has been fiendishly busy.
On June 14th, I presented at BEA's Canadian Exec2Exec Forum, which tends to be our biggest conference event in Canada, inviting CIOs, VPs, and Directors of IT to Taboo Resort on Lake Muskoka. The theme of my talk was "Innovating Beyond the Enterprise" -- a business-oriented view on many of the things I speak about for a technical audience on Stu Says Stuff.
My claims:
- Businesses are changing the way they arrange processes & resources. In short, it's a move from "push" to "pull"-oriented process models. This has been discussed in many places, including John Hagel & John Seely Brown, the Lean Enterprise community, Lean Software Development, and Agile Management. Analogies of this approach are everywhere, in all human activities. Resources have evolved from being about land, labour, capital, and enterprise that are pushed through a value chain into the New Growth Theory of ideas and things that are recombined to create value and long-term wealth capacity. It indicates a move to consumer-driven approaches to organizational design, and goal-oriented approaches to resource mobilization and activity management (vs. function or process-driven).
The point is not that "pull" is better than push -- there are plenty of cases where one wants a process to be managed for efficiency, or when demand is stable. The point, I think, is that pull models have been unintuitive or have required such high transaction costs as to be uneconomical. That's changing, due in part to SOA and Web 2.0.
- The "service network" is evolving into a web of resources and capabilities. This term is a BEA-ism, referring to an internetwork of humans and computers, organized and governed via standard agreements, with services-orientation as a unifying metaphor and design approach.
This is where I make a call for SOA to evolve from simple message exchanges into hypermedia. Simply put, if I pull resources, the consumer agent must be in charge of defining the application. If a registry is required to discover everything, the producer is in charge. By placing control directly into information through hyperlinks, enforcing global naming & data authority standards, and exposing a uniform interface, hypermedia drastically reduces the barrier to consume resources capabilities for both humans and machines.
I ask the executives:
- Why is the barrier to entry to your services so high? Why does there need to be a new project to consume a service?
- Why can't you put your $100m unified customer profile into web browser's URL and look at it, bookmark it, tag, it, or mash it?
- Can you create situational applications that form to meet an immediate need, do not require capital allocation, and can dissolve without pain?
The key political insight of a web architecture is that regardless of how much automation is involved in a transaction, a human is always responsible for the outcome.
BEA is working to address this area. The really interesting developments will be this nexus between strategy, enterprise architecture, process management, classic (component-influenced) SOA, and Web-enabled (RESTful) SOA, all of which are influencing the other's development.
- Information assurance will be a major limiting factor. We often talk about governance -- SOA governance, mashup governance, etc. Ron Schmelzer from ZapThink claims "Just because something can be mashed up doesn't mean it should be". All of this is true, but it's just a recognition that data is political. But -- data has always been political! In my opinion, there's a lot to learn from the data warehousing and BI communities here, who have had to manage privacy, entitlement, and quality issues for fifteen years.
The "new" governance , the one that frightens many because it integrates so many specialties, is Information Assurance, which is a multi-disciplinary approach to manage, protect and defend information from risk.
Comments
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Actually we have full feeds. For this feed, it's here
Posted by: jonmountjoy on July 5, 2007 at 3:37 PM
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BEA's blogs tend to prefer shorter blurbs for the feed portion. Do you subscribe to others in Dev2Dev or Arch2Arch that are using full feeds?
Posted by: scharlto on June 28, 2007 at 8:02 AM
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How about full feeds for your posts? I don't usually click through to read anyone's posts (more than once...)
Posted by: Sandy Kemsley on June 27, 2007 at 2:38 PM
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