Tag Archives: system

Stop talking SOA and start digging it

by Miko Posted on February 5, 2009

Joe McKendrick of ZDNet invented the phrase “Shovel ready SOA”

I too like this metaphor… I see a lot of digging going on.

I spent yesterday talking to a large enterprise doing SOA and there was a joke that you had to pay a dollar every time you said “SOA”. It’s no longer cool to talk about SOA!

But it was all we talked about all day for four hours, in a meeting with about twenty people. It’s pretty funny. People were “digging it.”

Rebranding SOA
A good friend of mine back in the early days of SOA told me “SOA is like sex in High School… everyone TALKS about it but nobody is actually DOING IT!” It seems like that trend has completely reversed. Nobody talks about it anymore but it seems like everywhere I turn someone is doing it! SOA is so uncool that Enterprise Architecture is now considered uncool. Tony Baer suggests in his blog that we “lose the name”. I suggest that Enterprise Architecture needs REBRANDING. The Daily Show had an excellent example video of how rebranding can help.

Shovel-ready SOA
Like the “Shovel ready” infrastructure projects like the national road system, the “business justification” is slightly limited on a case by case basis. How can I justify the cost of a highway system if I’m only thinking about going to the store today and willing to spend $1 to get there and back?

But if you add up all of the utilization of the road system, it becomes obvious that without our roads, our economy would be a lot less effective and that having them enables whole new economic opportunities to exist that didn’t before.

So the question becomes–when do you invest in infrastructure? Ask Warren Buffett who says “be bold when others are fearful and be fearful when others are bold”. Or ask Franklin Delano Roosevelt about the New Deal.

It’s 2009, become the change we need.

Stop talking and start digging.

my 2 cents.
Miko

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Entertaining and heartfelt post about REST

by Miko Posted on July 9, 2008

I like the passion, style, and urgency of this post and concur that IT is going through a pretty major upheaval right now.

Let me start by saying that IT is dying. No, Nick Carr did not kill it. No, it is not dying because “It does not matter”. It is dying because IT can’t do its job. IT can’t do it’s job because ever since we left the mainframe era IT has been served sub-optimal technologies, developed in a hurry by people largely incompetent (on the business side), sometimes simply greedy, that didn’t give a damn about what they were chartered to do. 90% of the people I met on the vendor side match this description.

Good stuff. =)

While applauding the tone, major themes and style of this post, I wanted to comment that it’s hard to imagine a different outcome for IT… Enterprise IT is an evolved information system (as is the brain), and we see layers and silos in the brain also–and we see non-adaptive behaviors (madness, mayhem, murder, suicide, etc)

Recall that an evolved system is subject to the constraints of
* Conservation
* Variation
* Fitness
Essentially meaning that we never throw away anything that performs a function (even if it performs it in a messed up way). We tend to try out a lot of very different things to see what works best, and we tend to compete for resources using all kinds of different strategies.

I realize that mutation and natural selection is somewhat “random” and we could hope that Enterprise IT would “evolve” in a way that was a bit more rational. But lets be realistic–most Enterprise IT systems have a long life span that stretches across many different people’s employment. People come and go, messed up legacy IT stuff sticks around.

So an honest look at Enterprise IT certainly shows that it appears to be deeply messed up from the core all the way out. You could say the same thing about the deeper parts of the human brain responsible for tribalism, me-first-screw-you survivalism, aggression and violence, inappropriate sexual behavior and other primitive impulses. But given that we are where we are, what’s the best solution to evolving our way out?

My 2 cents,
Miko

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