Mashups in the financial sector aren't just for the back office

I spent last week in NYC talking about mashups to a number of customers in the financial sector. I love going to NY, and last week the weather was beautiful and all the designer dogs were out in force in Central Park. The outlook from our financial institution clients wasn’t quite so perfect, however.

Here’s the message I heard over and over again: Mashups in the financial industry were only good for the back-office, not the front-line. So while we can help make their order-to-cash process mean and lean, we can’t help them bring innovative products to their customers.

I understand the reasons. Financial institutions have to be conservative. When bankers and investment institutions stray from the straight and narrow, somebody will likely be in front of Congress right before they go to jail. S&L bailout anyone? Would you like to invest in some junk bonds? Let's depend on Enron for our retirement portfolio. Oh yes, let’s not forget subprime mortgages.

So while I understand their reluctance to adopt mashups on the front-end of their business, I think it is a mistake. I wouldn’t expose the banking systems until we get better mashup security. But financial institutions have a lot of other offerings that aren’t tied directly to their transactional back-end systems.

Why should they bother?

Financial institutions have to walk a fine line. They are in a constant struggle to balance the need for governance, the heavy load of compliance, and a cutthroat competitive landscape. And the financial sector depends heavily on technology to be competitive. And not necessarily technology within a traditional IT organization.

According to a Booz Allen Hamilton study, for every dollar spent on ‘real’ IT, most industries also spend 78 cents on ‘shadow IT.’ That is, IT funded directly by, and implemented within the business. In the financial sector I’d be willing to bet the ratio is much higher. One bank employee I talked to said that embedding IT within the business is a necessary practice just to stay competitive. When one bank innovates, the others have to be right behind. That means tight coupling between the technologists and the business so new and innovative offerings can be out the door fast.

This sounds like a perfect job for mashups.

I’m not an expert on the institutional side, but I do have a number of personal and small business accounts with a couple of handfuls of banks and investment firms. As a consumer of financial services, I’ve got a number of ideas for how they could use mashups without compromising their core banking systems.

How about a money management mashup? Most banks have money management information, but wouldn’t it be a good idea to mash information from multiple sites, mashing book sales from Amazon? Then not only could the company provide good value to their customers, they might also be able to turn their website into a profit center.

Ditto for investment information. I have accounts with several investment firms, yet when I want to do any investment research, I have to search Yahoo! finance to get the financials and Google for any relevant news. I’d use a mashup that pulled that information together into a single page.

How about a mashup that pulls together many investment strategies? Again mashing up books from Amazon and information from some of the leading personal finance strategists. How about a mashup that lets me compare and contrast a company’s performance against some of its nearest competitors? Then mash in some Google Docs to let me save my analysis so I can retrieve it later.

And on the other side of the equation, banks and investment firms should turn some of their free web content into widgets. For example, Fidelity has a DJIA chart on their home page. If this was a widget, and they modified it to show provenance, Fidelity would get free advertising whenever someone added the widget to a mashup.

I’m not buying that mashups aren’t a good fit for the financial services industry. Most of the innovation, at least on the consumer side, isn’t in the back-end transactional systems. It’s out front, providing services, information and advice to customers.

Again, a perfect job for mashups.

Smoking pot and stealing music. Some things never change.

OK, I admit I wrote that title to see if I could trick some people into reading this post. But really, I will actually compare the two. My motivation is a recent article by Linda Tucci, a writer for SearchCIO.com. It made me smile because it was about how millennials don't respect organizational, hierarchical or other boundaries. These millennials are going to cause security headaches because they don't respect IT policies and procedures either.

This is a hot news flash?

In her defense, Tucci was simply reporting on the results of a Symantec survey, first blogged by Symantec employee Samir Kapuria. But those of us who have either been interacting with these younger workers, or have children of that age who are about to enter the workforce, already know we've got an IT compliance disaster waiting to happen. I know that my own daughters have absolutely no respect for IP rights. In their minds, anything on the public web is and ought to be theirs for the taking. Lectures about the morality of downloading music and video fall on deaf ears. As do discussions about network security and malware.

These conversations reminded me of discussions I had with my parents about pot smoking when I was a teenager. My parents lectured me on the evils of marijuana, but in my peer culture at the time, nearly everyone smoked it. In fact, the University of Michigan and Michigan State University had parties every spring, called the Hash Bash , to protest pot laws. While I never had the guts to light up on the steps of the capital and get carted away in nonviolent protest, I wasn't above cutting class (I was in High School at the time) and joining in the party.

Bear with me. This isn't just a stroll down memory lane. It really is about mashups.

In my view at the time, and the view of many in my generation, pot was not only a civil right, it was symbol. Sure, flaunting the anti-pot laws was fun. But it was also morally defensible to break the laws in protest of unnecessarily restrictive rules and regulations. I believed my parent's views were not only behind the times, not just old fashioned. They were wrong, and nothing they said changed my mind.

That's the attitude I see in my children. Talking to them about network security, IP rights, privacy, and even footnoting, is like talking to a brick wall. For them, free access and use of all information is not only a civil right. Breaking IP and security rules is a form of political protest against unnecessary and restrictive rules and regulations. Here's the money quote from the article.

When asked whether they feel entitled to use whatever application or device or technology they would like, regardless of source or corporate IT policies, 69% of millennials said yes, compared with 31% of other workers. Indeed, 75% of millennials have downloaded software on their work computer for personal use, vs. 25% of other workers -- even though 85% of the organizations surveyed indicate their policies restrict that practice. Millennials also regularly store their corporate data on personal devices: 39% on personal computers, 38% on personal USB devices, 20% on personal hard drives and 16% on personal smartphones.

CIOs should be very afraid of these survey results. Especially since the same survey showed that IT and other corporate leaders believe they have good rules in place, and that everyone understands and mostly obeys them. Those who don't comply get fired.

Most of the Millennials I know aren't afraid of losing their job. They aren't going to get intimidated by getting yelled at by the boss. Organizations who try to restrict the use of personal devices, who prohibit social networking and other Web 2.0 applications, who try to legislate the use of web content, are either going to be mired in lawsuits, or are going to find that they can't hire innovative and out-of-the-box thinkers.

What's the alternative? I'd like to fall back on the agreement I've now forged with my children. I've worked for companies that blocked sites, monitored email, recorded web access and filtered out 'bad' words in IM. I didn't care for it, and I wasn't going to turn around and do the same thing in my own home. Nor could I simply ignore the problem. While I know pirating is illegal, I also believe it is wrong.

We finally came to a compromise that we worked out together. They don't completely like it, still believing I'm backwards-thinking. I don't completely like it, believing they will have ample opportunity to break the law. But because it is a negotiated agreement rather than a dictated policy, I have some hope of success.

• They are now free to download anything that is really free, not pirated free. MySpace is full of 'really free' music and video, and a lot of it is quite good.
• They can keep their MySpace accounts, but they must allow me access to their profiles. (Neither of them like Facebook. Probably because I use it.)
• They have an iTunes budget. It isn't large, but it is enough to buy a few songs now and then.
• They won't download software without my approval. I can only deny the download if the software is harboring malware, if it's content is objectionable or if it will cost too much.
• They agree not to store any pirated content on their computer.
• I've asked them not to 'borrow' pirated content from their friends. I've told them I'll throw away any media that I believe has pirated content.

So far it's either working or they are very good at making it appear to work. I won't take bets.

I think IT has to do something similar. In old paternalistic, hierarchical organizations it might be considered a sign of weakness to negotiate policy with subordinates. Our millennials are going to change that mindset. Corporate leaders will need to work with their employees rather than dictate to them, or they will face not being able to recruit or retain the quality of worker they need. So instead of a restrictive IT policy based on sanctions and Big Brother thinking, we'll probably end up with something similar to the agreement I have with my kids.

With respect to mashups, I think we'll also end up with something similar.

• If you mash content from the web, note the source.
• If you mash content from behind the firewall, make sure the content isn't sensitive.
• If you are mashing services from the web, make sure they don't have viruses, understand the costs, and try to use reputable sources.
• If you are mashing services from behind the firewall, make sure the services don't expose sensitive information.

Are these guidelines bulletproof? Of course not. There isn't an IT policy today that's bulletproof. What these guidelines do is help the masher understand what the issues are and why he/she should be concerned. These guidelines treat the masher like an adult, not like a naughty child or convicted felon that must be monitored.

Some may think this is mere kowtowing to these new bad boys entering the workforce. Further proof that the world is going to Hell in a hand basket. Me? I can't wait until these younger workers roll in and shake everyone up. Will we have chaos? Will there be security problems? Are there going to be mistakes, upheavals and disasters?

Most certainly. But there will also be progress.

(Note to horrified readers: I stopped smoking pot in High School. I didn't then, and still don't, think there is anything wrong with it. I just needed to get my act together academically. After HS I always ended up in jobs that required a security clearance. And now it just doesn't interest me.)

Can I take back what I said about BPM and mashups?

Back what seams a very long time ago, but was actually only October last year, I wrote a post suggesting that BPM was another form of business mashup. Like-minded blogger Sandy Kemsley agreed, and bemoaned the lack of mashup understanding in the BPM community.

I've kept an eye on the BPM community looking for activity around mashups. I've seen a few comments around the edges, but nothing I would call a trend.

I was confused. Presentation mashups and BPM may have little in common, although I would suggest that Tibco, with their focus on RIA composite applications, have been playing in the presentation mashup space for a while. (Others will likely disagree, and we can have a discussion.) However, once you get 'out of the map' and start considering mashups from a business or enterprise angle, the overlap becomes pronounced.

(Note: my good friend Summer Ficarrotta coined the term 'out of the map' months ago to help people understand that Google Maps mashups at the glass weren't the only mashups on the block.)

I think I fell into the trap of thinking that because two things look the same and act the same, they should be the same. (Do you remember Papa Bear in The Big Honey Hunt?) I have a recent article by TechTarget writer Rich Seeley to thank for getting my head out of my trap. Through his insights about BPM and SOA roles and responsibilities, I now understand just how different BPM and mashups are.

In his article about the business and IT roles within SOA and BPM, he lists eight different roles involved in creating a BPM/SOA application, four each in business and IT.

Business Roles

• Business Leader: Responsible for overall business performance, compliance and governance.
• Business Professional: Manages business performance and decides on strategic and tactical needs for a specific area of responsibility.
• Business Analyst: Interprets business professional and business leader requests and documents them into process models.
• Process Analyst: Specialized business analyst who concentrates on the simulation and analysis of processes in their business environments and their interactions.

IT Roles

• IT Leader: A Business Leader responsible for delivering technology solutions that enable the business.
• IT Analyst: Interprets business analyst inputs/requirements in the context of IT capabilities, works with team on IT-based business process improvement.
• IT Architect: Defines basic operational imperatives in the provisioning of IT services with a focus on resiliency, reuse and adaptability.
• IT Developer: Follows IT architectural principles to create "building blocks" for the construction of applications.

Whew! Imagine putting a mashup together where you needed four different roles to put an idea together before tossing it over the wall to IT where four more roles did the implementation. I'm not saying this is too much for BPM. High-value and highly-complex systems need governance and discipline during their ideation and construction, regardless of whether they are implemented as a custom application built from scratch by App Dev, or as a business process built atop a BPMS.

What I'm saying is this is too much for mashups.

The premise of Serena's paper on the long tail of applications development is that there are many applications that IT never implements because they aren't high value or complex enough to merit IT involvement. This is 'The Long Tail' of Applications Development. At the time we wrote the paper I thought that BPM could be one of the answers. After all, BPM was all about empowering the business to define and build applications.

And that's where I made my bloomer. Mashups need to be easy to build, easy to deploy and easy to maintain. Mashups need some governance, as I've written about here, here, and here. (Yes, this is a subject I care about.) Just not as much as an expensive and complex App Dev initiative. They also need some lifecycle management. Again just not as much as a typical App Dev initiative.

Now I'll go on record as saying they don't need as much governance and lifecycle management as Big BPM either.

Applications Development has a long tail, a tail that can be serviced, in part, through the use of mashups. Contrary to what I've said before, BPM also has a long tail. A tail that can be serviced, in part, through the use of mashups.

What I won't say any more is that BPM is a business mashup platform. It may look the same. It may act the same, but it isn't the same at all.

Dapper has a lot of promise, but boy can it be annoying!

I haven't done a review in a while, so I thought I'd get back into it, starting with Dapper. I came across them in a Hinchcliffe blog entry about the most promising mashup tools. He had Dapper on the list, along with other more well-known tools such as JackBe, who still won't let me test their product.

Dapper allows developers to pull content from websites and expose them using various APIs. There is nothing new about this. Nearly all the products I've reviewed have this capability. Dapper differentiates itself with the number of different APIs it supports, which I'll get to later. The list is very impressive, but doesn't include SOAP.

Too bad about SOAP, but I understand. SOAP is overkill for screen scraped content. You don't need transactional integrity or security (not that SOAP has that problem licked) if you're just pulling read-only content from a page. Still, it does mean I can't use the content in something like a BPEL orchestration. Clearly that use isn't something Dapper has in mind. Then again, neither did Intel MashMaker or Kapow.

For consistency with my other reviews, I attempted to create a feed from the news page on the Serena website. No luck. Dapper couldn't load the page. So next I went to Digg to add recent news items. While Dapper loaded the page, it scrambled the page elements. I couldn't pull the top news stories from digg/science or digg/technology.

Next I went to my own blog to see if I could pull my content into a feed. I know, everyone can already get a blog as a feed, but this was an experiment. The instructions for Dapper say its selection algorithm will work better with multiple similar pages, so I added the links for my most recent three posts and went to the next step, selecting the contents to scrape.

Unlike other screen scraping technologies I've played with, Dapper has some smarts built in. Their algorithm supposedly helps mashers select the right content to pull into the API without having to mess around with Xpath. Well, certainly there is an algorithm in place, but I found it much more of an annoyance than a help. I couldn't get selections to work correctly, and when I tried to de-select manually, I got a page script error and the interface stopped in its tracks. I couldn't interact with the application at all, and had to reload the entire page with a new URL.

I went back to the start and tried it again, and got similar results, except that I didn't even try manually de-selecting page elements. Instead I wondered if I should not give Dapper multiple pages to work with. I selected 'Back' in the interface to return to the page where I selected my inputs, intending to remove all but the latest blog entry. And guess what?

Right! I got an error on the page again. The 'Back' link didn't work either. At least this time the interface didn't freeze up.

After a while I defined something close to the selections I wanted. (I never did get the exact content.) And now for the reason Dapper is different. The reason I kept playing with Dapper despite its many flaws: I could expose the content as POX, RSS, Filtered RSS, HTML, a Google gadget, a Netvibes module, a PageFlake, a Google map, an image loop, an iCalendar, Atom, CSV, JSON, XSL, YAML or even as an email. True, a lot of these formats don't make sense for blog content, but it's nice to have the option.

I especially liked the preview that let me take a look at the content before finalizing my output format choice. That was sweet.

Bottom line. I wouldn't use Dapper today for production mashups. It just isn't ready. However, when Dapper fixes their algorithm so it isn't annoying, when they do some serious debugging, when they fix their performance issues and when they otherwise clean up their usability, it will be one killer application for creating mashable content.

IT run-around crowd can't bypass the need for 'real' web services

I just finished reading a post by Patty Seybold in her Outside Innovation blog. In this post she bemoans the looming mashup hype, but notes that it's about time mashups enter the mainstream.

Too true.

Seybold goes on to say that mashup vendors are trying to convince potential customers that they don't need IT. In Seybold's words, these vendors are saying,

You don't have to wait for your IT department to wrap your back-end application functionality into real Web Services, you can "cheat" by extracting data in the form of reports and turning them into RSS feeds, which you can mash up with graphical user interfaces and tools.

She is implying, although she doesn't come out and say it outright, that this view of mashups is flawed. In this I completely agree.

Consider the sort of 'application' you can create with this approach. You can pull together data, you can bring in interesting visual elements, you can consolidate information, and you can look at it in a unified GUI. But you can't do anything. The data and visual elements aren't in the context of a business activity.

Clearly these mashups aren't going to be the killer apps Hinchcliffe notes are necessary for mashups to become a valuable enterprise tool.

Sorry, IT run-around crowd (Seybold's term) but any mashup vendor saying you can bypass IT and get what you need through RSS feeds, screen scraping and widgets isn't considering that you will need access to back-end enterprise services to get the most out of your mashup investment.

Let's consider an example. Let's say your sales manager wants to keep track of important news cross-referenced to either existing accounts, or opportunities in the pipeline. This could be put together by mashing up CRM data, available through reports and screen scraping, with RSS news feeds, all without the help of IT. That would give the manager some great data, but he can't do anything with it unless he hops out of the mashup and into the CRM system.

The real killer application would allow the sales manager to action the data within the mashup. So, for example, if the manager sees that a company in his pipeline just hired a new COO, the manager could push a button to create a TODO item in the CRM system requesting the account manager arrange an introductory call with the new executive. That sort of interaction isn't enabled by RSS feeds. It is enabled by services connected to back-end systems controlled and managed by IT.

What mashup platforms will do is reduce your dependence on IT to construct new applications. IT can take on the role of a trusted partner rather than gatekeeper, but you still need them. Any mashup vendor who says otherwise doesn't understand your business.

More 2008 predictions from the 'unnamed analyst'

Let me start out by congratulating Encanvas. They have joined JackBe in the illustrious group of mashup vendors who won’t let me review their mashup tools for this blog. Here’s what they had to say when I asked.

As Serena is a close competitor to Encanvas I’m not sure that would be appropriate but we have the greatest admiration for any organization that is encouraging agile computing and it’s great to have competition - so keep doing good things.

The funny thing is that as far as I can tell, Serena’s never been in a deal against Encanvas. Competition. It’s all in the mind.

And now for something completely different…

The 2008 prediction machines are still at it, although I assume now that we are into February we will see them less often. One leading analyst firm, whose name I can’t give you since they would require I run this post through their vendor relations department, has made Web 2.0 predictions for 2008. Hint: They aren’t Gartner. As in the past, I’ll just call them the Unknown Analyst. (UA)

Here’s their 2008 mashup predictions.

• Mashup vendors will start seeing a return on their investment in 2008, but at the expense of other Web 2.0 technologies.

Bloomberg at ZapThink already made a similar prediction. And just as I did before, I must disagree. 2009 will be the year of mashups rather than 2008. I hope to be wrong, but I don’t think I will be. Web 2.0 is just emerging into the enterprise, and mashups will be at the tail end of Web 2.0 spending. RSS, wikis, blogs and social networks are all going to be on the short list for 2008, with mashups entering the list in a big way in 2009.

• Enterprise mashups will come out of the closet, and the vendors who influence standards boards and best articulate mashup value will set market expectations.

My take is that standards boards aren’t going to make a big difference. If mashups were stressing technology to IT customers, then standards would be important. But we need to remember that mashup customers will likely come from the business side of the house. Business users don’t give a hoot about mashup standards for security, widgets, REST contracts, etc. These are vendor problems the vendors need to solve.

However, while I disagree with the notion that standards board leadership will make much of a difference in market leadership, I completely agree that articulating mashup value will make a difference. If I can convince you that mashups will help you leverage your SOA investments to build those applications now languishing at the bottom of IT’s priority list, then I will likely get your business. If I can't convince you, then I won't.

• Vendors from adjacent markets such as EAI and portals will enter the mashup fray in 2008. Pure-play Web 2.0 vendors will be the losers because big players like Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and HP will Web 2.0-enable their current offerings.

This is a very interesting prediction. In effect it says that stand-alone Web 2.0 technologies don’t matter as much as Web 2.0 technologies in the context of existing business problems. So will I need a social network solution in my company if my BI vendor puts one in the reporting portal? Do I need a stand-alone enterprise RSS solution if my existing reporting tools, Sharepoint and CRM vendors add the ability to export notifications as RSS or Atom feeds?

I think, for the most part, the answer is ‘no.’ Enterprises will be able to make do with Web 2.0 features added to existing vendor offereings. At least when combined with open source readers, wikis and blogs.

But mashups? I don’t think so.

Consider a scenario. Assume you want to pull your financial information together with lead data from CRM, marketing program plans from MRM and historical statistical information from BI. You also want to wrap a process around these data to calculate whether a program will generate the number of leads necessary, and alert Marketing to take action when it looks like a program will not meet expectations. If you were depending on one or the other of these tools to provide a mashup platform, you wouldn’t have a unified end-user experience, your process would be dictated by the host tool you happened to choose, and you would end up with the same point-to-point integration problems that have been causing headaches since the dawn of applications development.

In other words, you would have an integration, not a mashup.

So while I agree that some Web 2.0 technologies such as social networking, wikis and blogs may not be good long-term product strategies for independent pure-play vendors, I think mashups have a chance.

Right up to the point where they are purchased by one of those big guys, something not predicted by UA.

What would George Carlin say about the Ten Mistakes Companies Make When Implementing SOA?

In Paul Callahan’s recent eWeek article he lists ten mistakes companies make when they implement SOA Projects. It’s a pretty good list, and I’ll summarize it here, but I’d like to do some tweaking.

Do you remember George Carlin explaining how the Ten Commandments could be boiled down to two, with another added for good measure? If not go take a look. That’s what I think about this list. It isn’t bad, but it needs some tweaking.

Let’s take a quick look at the ten first, and then I’ll discuss how I would consolidate.

1. Taking a Shotgun Approach. That is, SOA-enable everything, regardless of whether there is a business need for the resulting services. LogicLibrary’s Brent Carlson likes to call this A Bunch of Services. (ABOS) and is one of the most common pitfalls of Big SOA.


2. Failing to Involve Business Analysts. Technologists tend to think of SOA as a technology initiative rather than a business initiative. When that happens, not only do the wrong things get built, but it is unlikely the organization will ever see the sort of ROI promised by these technologists.


3. Spending More Time on SOA Products Than SOA Planning. Given lack of business direction, IT will tend to think that SOA is something that you buy rather than something you do.


4. Tackling the Largest Projects First. Sure it is inviting to make a big splash with your SOA initiative. But isn’t it better to try to walk before you run?


5. Forgetting that SOA is a Business Problem. It’s not about the technology; it’s about the solution to a problem.


6. Treating Identity as an afterthought. Readers of this blog will know that this is one I take very seriously. Security and identity are the soft underbellies of SOA, and we need to build for security and identity up front.


7. Buying New Products When Existing Investments Suffice. This is a special case of thinking of SOA as a technology rather than a business solution. You don’t always need to buy new stuff, no matter how much you are told to do so by vendors.


8. Misunderstanding Company Key Players. We live in a world of silos, and if you want to play in a sandbox belonging to someone else, you’d better ask first. Don’t assume you will be allowed to SOA-enable legacy systems, deploy to servers or install clients. Find out first, ask, and then get to work.


9. Expecting the SOA Project to Spread Quickly. This isn’t just an issue for SOA, but for any enterprise project where the success or failure of a project is tied to ‘the enterprise’ rather than to a specific project.


10. Lacking Necessary Elements. Embarking on Big SOA without Big SOA resources.

Here’s how I would rework the list. Numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 10 are actually different manifestations of the same problem: Treating your SOA rollout as a technical rather than a business problem. If you focus on your business issue, you won’t have ABOS, you will include business in the discussions, you won’t try to ‘buy SOA’ rather than solve your problem, you won’t think it’s a necessity to buy new stuff, you will tie the success of your SOA rollout to a specific business problem and you won’t go down the Big SOA path if you won’t be able to carry through with it.

So now we have four remaining issues.

Numbers 4 and 8 belong together as well. Both are saying the same thing: Start small. Organizations that start small won’t try to tackle the big, high-profile problems first. They also won’t run into the problem of stepping on somebody’s toes. Or at least the likelihood will be much less.

That leaves number 6, treating identity as an afterthought. I’d like to expand this a bit and say that treating scalability, security and identity management as an afterthought is the real mistake.

I’d also like to add an additional mistake. Forgetting your consumers. Effective SOAs will have multiple consumers, and multiple types of consumers. Design your SOA so it can be used by composite applications developers, BPM process gurus, portal programmers and mashers. Then you will be able to get the ROI you need to make your SOA investment an unqualified success.

So like George, I’d like to restate the items in a positive light.

1. Always remember that you are solving a business problem.


2. Start small and scale up as you learn.


3. Design for scalability, security and identity management up-front.


4. Remember your consumers.

Of course, if I really wanted to be true to George I’d add a 5th to the effect that I should keep my &^%$# opinions about SOA to myself.

Hinchcliffe and Chappell Predictions for 2008 Part 1 - The Death of Big SOA

It's that time of year again. Everyone is writing their predictions for 2008. Some are bullish, some bearish, some worth reading, some not. Of the myriad predictions out there, I like the ones written by Dave Chappell and Dion Hinchcliffe the best. I almost completely agree with everything they have to say. However because I don't completely agree, it gives me an excuse to write.

I suggest you read both posts in full. They are definitely in the 'worth reading' category. but I want to comment on two points made by both gentlemen. First is about the demise of Big SOA. The second is about the need for mashup governance. Unfortunately, there is too much to write for a single post, so I'll break it up into a two-part series for your reading pleasure.

2008 – The Year Big SOA Died

Chappell and Hinchcliffe are as one in their predictions for the demise of Big SOA. “That’s nice,” you say, “but what is Big SOA and what does it have to do with business mashups?” Good questions, both, so let me address them one at a time.

I’m not sure we have a good definition of Big SOA. Like porn, however, we know it when we see it. Does the initiative span the entire organization? Does it incorporate a lot of planning? Does it have a multi-year rollout schedule independent of any mission critical project? Does the SOA plan stress measures of effort, such as the number of services to be built, rather than results?

Most tellingly, when you ask the project owner to describe the business problem they are solving with their SOA initiative, do they say something like, “SOA enables developers to build applications more quickly, reducing costs through service reuse.” Hint: this isn’t a description of a business problem; it is a description of a technology solution in search of a business problem.

Big SOA is all about the big picture, which can be a very good thing. It’s good to have an understanding of what the organization’s SOA will look like in five years. Of course, in six months the five year plan will be out of date, but that’s beside the point. Thinking about the big picture can help tactical implementations fit into an overall strategy of growth, security and scalability. Big SOA becomes a problem, however, when the objectives are technical rather than business focused, when the measures of success describe effort rather than results, and when the initiative itself is not tied to the success of specific business initiatives.

Can Big SOA be done right?

Certainly. Let’s consider an example. Let’s say your sales organization has decided that adding social networking to your eCommerce site, currently a Web 1.0 app, will increase sales by 15% in the first year. The project gets funded, and the eCommerce product team makes an architectural decision to build the features using SOA. They consult the Enterprise Architecture group to see how the eCommerce initiative should fit into the enterprise SOA master plan. EA and App Dev work together to modify the enterprise SOA master plan, and to plan for the eCommerce upgrade. At implementation time the eCommerce team leverages work done elsewhere in the organization by re-using and re-factoring services and infrastructure.

In other words, Big SOA is the keeper of SOA strategy and an enabler of enterprise reuse strategy. Little SOA implements the strategy on a tactical level and makes use of the shared assets built in other projects.

Now consider Big SOA run amok. This is a story told to me by someone I met at a conference last year where I was giving a talk on consumption-side SOA governance. During the Q&A period, one of the attendees said her SOA project didn’t include any consumption-side considerations. This puzzled me since the consuming applications are where all the ROI will be realized. She said her company’s SOA initiative included a plan to roll out 500 services in the first year, and then make those services available to App Dev, who would be responsible for using the SOA infrastructure in any new initiative. When I asked her “Why 500 services?” she said it was the number they decided was right for an organization of their size.

Run away, far away. That’s what I told her, at least.

Big SOA has been fueled by middleware vendors trying to sell bloated app server stacks, by SOA governance and management vendors and by analyst firms. This next statement will likely generate hate mail, but I believe their efforts were cheered on by Enterprise Architects searching for a way to become more operational and less purely advisory. As a result, businesses have spent a lot of money and significant effort to plan and implement Big SOA initiatives. Every application, every server, every database had to be pulled into the SOA fold. After huge outlays for consultants and software, and after spending lots of time and effort planning for the brave new world of SOA, these same organizations ended up with a five year rollout plan, a huge proposed budget, and no well-understood way to calculate their SOA's ROI.

That’s a problem. If I’m about to spend $30M developing an enterprise-wide SOA, I’m going to want to see a return sooner rather than later. It’s not just the amount of money, it’s the politics. IT doesn’t control its own budget anymore. Not since the dot-com bust. Something as strategic as Big SOA now requires business buy-in and business approval. When it comes time to approve the Big Budget that goes along with Big SOA, business will want to know how soon and how much ROI to expect. If IT can’t answer, then the business won’t fund.

Hence the demise of Big SOA in 2008.

So let’s move on to the next question. What does this have to do with business mashups? Business mashups need services. They need widgets. They need workflow. Mashups behind the firewall need SOA to get access to the myriad enterprise data currently locked in siloed applications. Mashups outside the firewall need WOA to pull data and display elements from the web at large. For business mashers to take on the task of drawing down the application development backlog, SOA is a necessary backdrop. So if Big SOA is doomed, and I completely agree with Hinchcliffe and Chappell that it is, what’s going to take its place?

Smaller, directed SOA initiatives, called Guerrilla SOA by ThoughtWorks practice lead Jim Webber, have a much better chance of succeeding. Rather than taking an enterprise-wide approach, Guerrilla SOA initiatives are funded by specific projects. Because they are part of a larger project, they don't have the visibility, nor the political liabilities that come with big ticket IT infrastructure projects. Also because they are funded by specific projects, it isn’t necessary to calculate the ROI for the SOA work itself. If the project is a success, that’s enough.

2005 was supposed to be the year of SOA and wasn’t. Then 2006 was supposed to be the year of SOA and wasn’t. Then 2007 was supposed to be the year of SOA and wasn’t. If we toss out Big SOA and go with guerrilla SOA, 2008 actually has the chance to be the year of SOA, only nobody will know it. The ROI won’t come from the SOA initiative itself, but rather from IT finally getting to those pesky integrations, and from subject matter experts in the business building mashups.

The demise of Big SOA may be just what’s needed to get SOA off the drawing board and into production. And that’s what mashers need to start cranking out those mashups.

Next post: Mashup governance. Will IT help or will IT hinder?