Best Practices

Steps to Make Your SOA a Guaranteed Success

David Linthicum, CEO - Linthicum Group LLC

While all organizations want their service-oriented architectures (SOAs) to be a success, the realities are that SOA is complex and far reaching. Thus, most will find that success is a matter of experience, and only time will reveal its systemic value. However, there are some things you can do to lower the risk of failure and increase the chances that your SOA will provide maximum ROI. Drilling down on the reasons for SOA, we find things that are fundamental to IT, including improved adaptability and agility or the ability to respond to business needs in near real time. Everyone wants agility, but years of architectural layers of databases, applications, and other technology have left enterprise architectures much too fixed and difficult to change. How do you raise your chances of success? In this presentation I’ll talk you through a few things you can do to guarantee that your SOA will be a successful endeavor.

What Happens When Relational Data, XML, and SOA Collide?

John Goodson, Vice President of Product Operations - DataDirect Technologies

You no doubt have a variety of technologies deployed in your enterprise to support your application solutions. You’ve started to utilize service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web services in your application infrastructure, and XML is now established as a mechanism for helping you standardize your data formats. Even as these new technologies begin to mature, the vast majority of your application data remains in relational databases such as Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, and Sybase. You’re interested in exploiting these new technologies within the framework of your existing relational databases and legacy data sources. This session will take a best practices approach in discussing how you can effectively leverage XML as part of your overall relational database strategy. In addition, the role that database connectivity plays within an SOA-based architecture will be discussed, and thoughts on XML, SOA, and relational databases will be offered, based on 20 years of experience with databases and defining data connectivity standards such as ODBC, JDBC, ADO.NET, and XQuery.

The presentation will include a look at XML and relational database technology in terms of what are the current trends relating to the combined use of XML data and relational data; what factors should be considered when designing a data infrastructure that leverages both hierarchical and relational data technologies; how should the relational database mechanisms that allow you to store and process XML data be used; and when should you use XQuery versus DOM, SAX, StAx, XSLT, XPATH, and so on.

The presentation will also cover SOA, Web services, and database middleware in terms of what factors should you consider in designing a standard for data connectivity in an SOA environment; what role do standards-based connectivity components such as ODBC, JDBC, and ADO.NET play now that Web services are becoming more prevalent; how should you go about designing an SOA-based architecture that can leverage your heterogeneous database and legacy data environments; and if you or your customers need access to mainframe data or business logic, how can your SOA-based infrastructure accommodate the mainframe resources?

From Zachman to IT Success: Third-Generation IT Approaches

Peter Herzum, President - Herzum Software

IT disciplines have come a long way since first-generation enterprise architecture approaches such as the Zachman Framework. This session illustrates the state-of-the-art IT approaches you need to succeed with IT today. Your view of enterprise architecture will change dramatically after we discuss the characteristics of first, second, third, and fourth generation IT approaches. We'll discuss the real-world architectural, IT, and business disciplines adopted by leading enterprises to "Manage IT as a Business, for the Business."

Take an Incremental Approach to Service-Oriented Architecture

Archie Roboostoff, Director of Product Management - NetManage

A recent survey by Aberdeen Research’s Peter Kastner found that a majority of enterprise IT professional respondents view a transition to SOA technology as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to drive lower IT integration cost savings, while improving the time it takes to deliver change to the business unit. Forrester Research data shows that more than 60 percent of large enterprises are implementing SOA. One of the biggest SOA challenges that large organizations face is that there is still a lot of confusion about where an organization should start in the implementation process. In fact, many organizations delay any SOA-related initiatives based on a lack of guidance on how and where to begin. When companies do start, this uncertainty often leads to an organization implementing an SOA incorrectly, which in many cases fails to meet cost and or time-to-deployment requirements and deliver real business value. Although there are several reasons for project failure, a CMP study noted that users cited the length of time to ROI as the major reason while others suggest that their organization lacks clear directions or goals for implementing SOA. This session will examine how companies can take an Incremental SOA approach to their IT architecture to achieve success. Since SOA lends itself to—and demands—incremental adoption, organizations that service-enable one process at a time tend to see their investments begin to pay off more quickly, often recovering their initial investment in 12–18 months. Participants will learn how to take an Incremental SOA approach and how to follow a proven four-step process. These steps—plan, build, evolve, and scale—are designed to help organizations take a phased, lower-risk approach to creating an SOA.

What You Need to Know About Software Risk Management

Guy Hoffman, President and CEO – Metallect

As software systems become increasingly large and complex, the need to predict and manage the effects of software change increases as well. Impact analysis is key to analyzing change or potential changes and the possible risks associated with them. Business and the applications that run them have become progressively more indistinguishable. As a result, the velocity of change required to support the business has accelerated in parallel. Improved visibility, dependency analysis, and software traceability have become increasingly critical to minimizing the risks and costs of delays and disruptions resulting from poorly planned and executed changes to software. This presentation will focus on how organizations can address the challenges of software change management through software risk management, which is the practice of assessing, mitigating, and managing the risks of unintended consequences associated with making changes to mission-critical business applications. Attendees will come away with an understanding of the complex nature and common causes of dependency-related risks in custom applications, how to assess and manage these risks and avoid the potential project delays and business disruptions, and specific techniques to make the application change management and acceptance process more predictable, reliable, efficient, and auditable. By understanding how visibility, impact analysis, audit, and compliance play a critical role in the software change management and acceptance process, application owners and change managers will learn how to mitigate risks while increasing predictability and reliability driving measurable value to their organizations.

Architecting the Enterprise for Performance

Bryan Cole, Load Testing Subject Matter Expert - Compuware
Jim Farley, Technical Specialist in Quality Technologies - Compuware

One of the most vexing issues faced by any enterprise architect is assuring the performance of mission-critical applications. In many cases, this issue is a combination of both application and infrastructure issues, including design and coding standards, interactions with other applications, operating system and systems performance, and network design. Performance problems often arise unexpectedly, putting pressure on practitioners to address the immediate issues, and re-architect systems and software to ensure that those and similar issues don't present roadblocks to expansion of both users and applications.This session works with enterprise and application architecture issues surrounding enterprise application performance. We will look at the causes of poor performance, how those causes manifest themselves in individual applications, and how they can be traced back to root causes. We'll also present a methodology for monitoring application and infrastructure performance during the application development life cycle and common problems and how they can be addressed.

Let's Complete Each Other: Enterprise Architecture and SOA

Yan Zhao, Director, Enterprise and Solutions Architecture - CGI Federal

Although there has been progress in recent years, enterprise architect development and practice remain complicated. Searching for more effective and efficient methods is a continuous effort.This presentation will address the missing, weak, or disjointed elements in today’s enterprise architecture practice, and where SOA can compensate through the Enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture (ESOA) model. We'll look at what ESOA is about, what ESOA means to an enterprise, and ESOA's major benefits. In addition, we'll discuss the approach and methodologies for ESOA practice, a reference for best practices, and provide and assessment for successful and usable ESOA maturity models. We'll also describe an integrated approach for enterprise architecture practice that includes federation, segmentation, and service orientation, and enables big enterprises to simplify their EA development efforts in an iterative and results-oriented manner.

Blogging the Enterprise: How Corporations Talk to Themselves

D.L. Byron, Principal - Textura Design Inc.

This case study discussion of Textura Design's work with Boeing, Intel, Fedex, NASA, and Genetech will focus on the unique uses of internal blogging as conversation tools, and how standards and technologies have made intranet user experiences richer. We'll look at RSS workflow with browsers and IE7 (a game changer for RSS in the enterprise). This overview will provide a specific example bolstered by a client.

Take a Resource-Oriented Approach to Software Development

Randolph Kahle, Title TK - 1060 Research

Resource-oriented (RO) architecture is an approach to design that is focused primarily on information. By considering information resources first, programming language, APIs and object models become secondary. The RO approach is at the heart of information systems such as the World Wide Web and Unix. In this presentation we introduce a resource-oriented software architecture that brings the Web's beneficial properties inside, to the structure of software. We will cover the principles of resource orientation, demonstrate higher-order composition of solutions, and show how production systems inherit the economic properties of large-scale RO systems in fine-grained, malleable, software solutions.