RSDC: Thoughts on SOA, Remote Working and Governance

The way that I typically judge the success of a panel is simple: does the audience participate and ask questions, or not? If you buy that metric, it would seem that the session I moderated two days ago, “Governance Implications of Adopting SOA Panel,” was an unqualified success. About 20 minutes in we received our first question, and they came in steadily and regularly from there on out.

Some of the questions were really quite good – one delved into Barry O’Reilly’s (CTO, Blue Cross / Blue Shield) thoughts on the metrics he used within his organization, and Ovum’s Bola Rotibi asked the IBMers (Danny Sabbah, Rational GM, and Dave Lubanko, Rational Principal Consultant) on how universities were or were not preparing students for SOA. For my part, however, I was most interested in hearing the panelists’ thoughts on how SOA and governance are affected by agile trends and speed of development. When posing this question to the panelists, I framed it by citing Jon Udell’s recent piece discussing an upgrade his bank’s online payments system. It said, in part:

When I logged in to my bank’s online system to pay some bills last night, I was greeted with the following message: “Bill payment system upgrade completed.”

Uh-oh. That’s a message I don’t want to see.

Thin-client software delivered through the Web can improve gradually and continuously, and that is one of its greatest virtues. When we could ship upgrades only once every year or two, we had no choice but to batch up the changes in ways that were guaranteed to disrupt the work habits of the people using our applications. But now we can trickle-feed those changes so that people can gradually adapt to them and we can more carefully monitor and adjust their experiences.

This comment, of course, was mentioned in the context of Software as a Service (SaaS) rather than SOA, but the two, I argued, are closely related. Nor did the panelists didn’t seem to take much exception to that idea.

This is interesting because it points at an interesting paradox within service oriented approaches. As we’ve discussed in the past with our Compliance Oriented Architecture notion, services are in many ways an ideal technical approach to horizontal business challenges such as compliance. At the same time, they pose unique governance challenges, because auditing, monitoring and managing applications that evolve on a weekly or even daily basis is not a trivial task. To paraphrase Homer Simpson, “To SOA – the cause of, and solution to, all governance problems.”

SOA is obviously not the only transition that IT staffs face in the coming years. As if the agility that SOA enables didn’t add enough of a degree of difficulty, so too must development organizations increasingly contend with the issues that geographically distributed engineering pose. While much has been made of HP’s against the grain decision to require its workers to return to the office, I’m a believer that MySQL is more indicative of the way forward. There were more than a few conversations at the conference of analyst firms and vendors alike losing quality employees due to overly restrictive work-from-home policies, and my commute back from the datacenter in the Denver Tech Center last week reaffirmed my intention to not waste whole swaths of my life stuck in traffic.

Faced as they are with the coming waves of services enablement, remote workers and SaaS it will be interesting to see what answers the various development communities come up with to the challenges posed by governance. Rational, of course, will put forward its portfolio as a means of fighting the tide of software development governance. And honestly, if some of the Jazz work pans out (more on that in a bit), they’ll sell quite a bit of software. The open source projects unable to afford such software need not go without, however, as there are some very credible packages available that tackle some of these issues; Bazaar-NG, for instance, which drew praise from Mark Shuttleworth in a recent conversation, has also earned the respect of none other than Sam Ruby.

In the end, the most accurate assessment of the state of some of the more future looking application development technologies was heard over and over during the conference here: it’s early days. Should be fun to see how it all plays out.