Workspace 360: Bridging the Divide

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Bill Roth's Blog | July 11, 2007   1:06 PM | Comments (0)

I started writing this post from the Conrad Bali, in Indonesia. Its part of my Asian trip talking to customers, press and Analysts alike about what we're doing around SOA, Enterprise 360, and my favorite topic, Workspace 360.

Workspace 360 is a key initiative around how BEA provides greater interoperability amongst its products, eases collaboration in the enterprise, and improves the ability of IT professionals to build out and implement a Service Oriented Architecture. There are 2 initiatives in BEA which illustrates how we're taking SOA notions out to the world, and also internalizing SOA: mSA and WorkSpace 360.

As illustrated above, Workspace 360 is our lead-off effort on how we bring the key roles within IT together. The second initiative is the microService Architecture(mSA). mSA is BEA's architectural plan around how we internalize SOA, by taking the SOA principles of loose-coupling, well-defined interfaces, and focus on services. Information can be found elsewhere on bea.com on mSA.

Simply put, Workspace 360 is designed to specifically address the lifecycle for composite application development.  In reality, it is a multi-generational plan on how BEA brings the key stakeholders in an organization to the same table so they can collaborate on building out information assets more quickly, and with fewer opportunities for miscommunication.  Workspace 360 is about creating a collaborative environment to close the gaps between the key stakeholders (business analyst, architect, developer, and IT operations) by seamlessly sharing information and assets amongst each other. The information shared amongst the different audiences is exposed through audience-specific views. Each audience is looking at the same application or service, but getting a different perspective based on their responsibilities. This empowers each stakeholder with the information necessary for addressing their role within the lifecycle.

It is important to note that WorkSpace 360 is not specific to AquaLogic or WebLogic. It spans all product lines at BEA: Tuxedo, WebLogic, and AquaLogic to create one seamless experience for addressing SOA lifecycle.  This experience addresses the entire SOA lifecycle in a unified manner (SOA Lifecycle Diagram) and facilitates collaboration across SOA participants

Pain Points

Why do we need Workspace 360? It is useful to consider the state of SOA adoption, in order to put the answer in context. A recent InfoWorld Study showed that SOA adoption is continuing to grow and mature.  This will drive demand for more service-oriented development of applications and by association,  composite applications development.  One of the main drivers is that business owners clearly see the need for SOA.

(Conducted by the IDG Research Services Group. Sponsored by BEA Systems and InfoWorld. April, 2007)

However, the biggest challenge facing IT is aligning with the business, understanding their business requirements, and keeping up with the rapid pace of change. So at least both sides are in agreement on what the real issue is. Alignment between business and IT, however, is not unidirectional. While the business has a hard time conveying requirements to IT, IT has a hard time conveying the complexity of fulfilling those requirements to the business. This bi-directional exchange of information is typically where something gets lost in the process, as this exchange occurs many times in the early stages of the lifecycle. The result is a perceived gap in business requirements and IT capability to deliver, as seen in the chart here.

While IT has certainly benefited from SOA, being able to accommodate change faster, it is no easy task. Take a BEA shop as an example. To create a simple single view of customer using AquaLogic Data Services Platform and exposing that via a portal can require up to 4 different tooling environments to make successful – WL Workshop 8.1 to create the data service, Eclipse to create transformation objects for AquaLogic Service Bus(ALSB), a web console for ALSB administration, and potentially a 4th tool depending on which portal you decide to use. Include 3rd party products in the picture and the problem increases exponentially.

Other problems include:

• Inability to react quickly to changing market dynamics and competitive threats
• Large gaps in communication amongst stakeholders
• Requirements fall through the gaps due to too much re-creation
• Little traceability to ensure alignment across individual stakeholders
• No ability to do impact analysis on changes to the system

Bringing Everyone to the Same Table

The key problem with the state of today's products, and the state of today's organizations, is that too many things get dropped or miscommunicated between different roles. The divide between departments or roles is the key reason for missed expectations and missed requirements between roles.

By providing a solution that focuses on a unified approach to the SOA lifecycle, WorkSpace 360 provides us the capability to address the role each domain/audience plays within the various stages, from design to implementation to deployment to management. The solution is to essentially bring the different roles to the same table, and have them all working off the same information, but in a language specific to each role.

For example, the business analyst can manifest their business requirements using business process modeling tools. The business analyst can then use the information from the business process model, together with operational or simulation metrics to collaborate with the system architect to help prioritize effort. The architect can then create the service orchestrations and assemblies to add architectural requirements on top of the business requirements to provide architectural control of what is to be built. This information can then be used to collaborate back to the business analysts to portray the complexity associated with the business requirements and justify funding. Architects may also use this information to collaborate with the developers and IT Operations to form an understanding of what needs to be built, how it’s to be built and how it’s intended to run. Developer and IT Operations can then implement, deploy, and manage the applications and services more accurately.

Throughout the lifecycle various analytics are gathered for each audience provided through a customized view. These views provide the stakeholders with visibility into the impact their work has on the business. Architects, for example, get visibility into architectural compliance, asset usage, and policy compliance information to help them identify where optimizations need to occur. IT Operations, on the other hand, get visibility into the operational and performance metrics associated with the different components to identify where optimizations in the infrastructure can occur. Business analyst get visibility into the operational metrics associated with how the business processes are being used to identify where optimizations can occur for the business. This is the closed loop feedback necessary for continued evolution and iteration of the lifecycle.

The metadata associated with all these different stages are at the core of the lifecycle, giving us greater control over our SOA environment to facilitate governance and enforce reuse, provide visibility into impact analysis and manage change.

The Table = Enterprise Repository + Collaboration

The notion of the registry/repository is at the core of WorkSpace 360. In fact, this was the main reason for our acquisition of Flashline. The repository becomes the single source of metadata in the enterprise. It also enables sharing of assets amongst key stakeholders, and in a sense becomes the "Table", and aids in closing gaps in communication . But more importantly, it enables governance of the artifacts created/used. This means that it allows a process where the creation and modification of metadata in an enterprise can be controlled by an architect or group of architects who attempt to achieve a kind of enterprise consistency. The repository also provides traceability and visibility for affecting change. Why is this important? Because it allows the IT architect the ability to do "impact analysis", essentially the ability to tell you what the effects of a particular change.

By having a repository in the center of our our architecture, it allows for structured and unstructured collaboration. The structured collaboration comes from having all the relevant metadata in one place, and making sure that each role sees the metadata in the view that is relevant for the job. BEA can also support unstructured collaboration via its range of Portal products (like WebLogic Portal and AquaLogic User Interaction) and is newly released Web 2.0 products like AquaLogic Pages.

Workspace 360

WorkSpace 360 was announced at BEA World 2006 as an innovative solution for addressing the SOA lifecycle and its key constituents: business analysts, architects, developers, and IT operations.  Expanding on this definition is that WorkSpace 360 provides a structured, collaborative approach to service oriented and composite application development.  This is an area of the market that is yet to be addressed by any of the big vendors. 

There is an established application development market that focuses on all the aspects associated with developing custom applications.  However, service oriented and composite application development introduces a new paradigm to development.  There is no longer one centralized team that is responsible for the development of every aspect of the application. Instead there are many distributed characteristics associated with composite applications that have different owners inside and outside the organizational boundaries.  Additionally, the number of roles involved has expanded to include many more participants then classic application development and each of these participants need to remain aligned.

The market for composite application development is still in the early stages.  Many customers are still focused on service enablement for their SOA and are just now starting to venture into the whole ‘application assembly’ space.  However, more customers are moving out of the pilot phase and into the departmental and enterprise-wide adoption of SOA, as the IDG study below shows. 

As this trend continues, the need for composite application development will increase.  Additionally, many customers are starting down the path of BPM + SOA convergence, which is the utilization of SOA within BPM processes.  While this may or may not be strictly composite application development, the concepts still apply. 

There are 4 key capabilities that make up WorkSpace 360:

1. Centralized Registry/Repository for management and governance of the artifacts involved. 
2. Team collaboration capabilities to facilitate communication amongst the participants involved and ensure alignment.
3. Embedded workflow that provides a structured approach to managing the lifecycle of composite applications and ties all the different component together.
4. A set of integrated ‘tools’ that plug into the above framework to utilize the automation capabilities provided.  These tools may consist of IDE’s, management consoles, integrated dashboards, or any other ‘tool’ a stakeholder may use to manage their day-to-day activities in the lifecycle. 

The key capabilities that make up WorkSpace 360 are independent of any other BEA product purchases. In other words, a customer that is a ‘.NET shop’ could plug into the WorkSpace 360 framework and get value out of the capabilities it has to offer.  A customer that is a ‘BEA shop’ would gain additional differentiated value merely from utilizing BEA products, whose integrations and interoperability with WorkSpace 360 should be more refined simply by being BEA. 

Conclusion

In summary, with WorkSpace 360, BEA will be the only vendor in the industry that provides a structured approach to composite application development while bringing the key stakeholders into a shared, collaborative environment that ultimately aligns business and IT to make the business more agile.  It also enables BEA to be one of the first vendors to provide a solution to the convergence of BPM and SOA. 

The support for heterogeneous environments broadens the market opportunity for BEA as well.  By not requiring an existing investment in BEA to utilize WorkSpace 360 and by being the only vendor that can currently address the problems outlined, BEA could potentially break in to competitive environments and grab a foothold. 

For customers, WorkSpace 360 provides a solution that enables the BPM and SOA convergence, which is a key value proposition that most customers are looking for.  Some other benefits this approach would enable include:

• A faster time to market for new applications and services to meet new business demands and market pressures
• Fewer miscommunications between stakeholders by providing a means to seamlessly share assets and information in a collaborative manner
• Elimination of requirements falling through the cracks by providing mechanisms for keeping all the stakeholders aligned
• Centralized access to assets for consistency
• Tighter feedback loops for gaining visibility into opportunities for additional investments

These are clearly things that would benefit both IT and the business.

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