Enterprise Initiatives

For SOA, technology is the easy part. Governance, processes, and commitment to the cause are key.



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There has been so much talk about SOA lately that I wanted to poll my fellow bloggers to see how far along your companies are. Please take a brief moment to answer this poll.

Nick Carr created one of the longest running questions I have ever seen when he wrote his book Does IT Matter back in 2004. There has been so much discussion arguing for both sides of the answer including this article from Harvard's Andrew McAfee. I believe that a key differentiator for a company is the business processes. For IT to Matter, IT must create an architecture that supports the business's need to dynamically change and customize their processes. This allows the business to be more self sufficient and agile, which leads to a better user experience and faster time to market.

This is why the BPMS and SOA vendors are cashing in right now. Many IT executives are starting to understand that IT needs to be more of a partner to the business then a cost of doing business. BPMS solutions allow IT to provide tools for the business to rapidly deploy new systems that can have a huge impact on the bottom line by:

• reducing costs through process reengineering
• identifying bottlenecks and providing what-if analytics for ongoing process improvement
• providing robust, AJAX & web enabled user interfaces
  
• providing visibility into performance metrics with built in business intelligence tools
• providing self service capabilities for the end users, thus reducing the dependency on IT resources

The smart IT executives are leveraging SOA to allow the BPMS tools to talk to the existing legacy systems by providing a service layer that acts as a bridge between the user interface and the backend systems. This allows IT to rapidly deploy new systems without having to throw away the huge investments made over the years on their existing systems.

So to make a long story short. Does IT Matter? It can matter if IT recognizes that "Process is King" and that the business and IT need to work hand in hand to provide solutions that create a competitive advantage.

I spent the last two days in Weston, FL. attending various BPM and SOA related lectures. One session I enjoyed was George Paras's "Connecting the Dots: Establishing THE Enterprise Perspective". George is the editor-in-chief for the Architecture and Governance Magazine.

George reminded us that as architects we should think, act, and behave as business people. Everything we do as architects should be geared around value creation by affecting change in the name of product innovation, process transformation, technology transformation, and business transformation. In other words, we need to enable the business to be better, faster, more efficient, better informed, etc.

He then went on to point out that one of the reasons that it is so hard to create business value these days is because our technology and our business processes have become so complex. He showed us one slide that states, "Complexity INHIBITS Change....Complexity consequently INHIBITS Business Value". In my opinion, as we begin to model both our operational and technical architectures, we must make it a goal to minimize the complexity and subscribe to the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid!) methodology.

The last golden nugget that I took away from George's presentation was about maintaining balance. George talked about how companies struggle to make progress towards establishing an enterprise architecture because the business demands so many tactical projects yielding only short term gains. The chief architect or architecture group must figure out how to get the company to start thinking strategically which yields long term gains. But be careful, you need to strike a balance between tactical and strategic. The business cannot stop while you go off for 6-12 months to create an enterprise architecture.

George's answer to the "Balancing Act" is the Managed Portfolio. The Managed Portfolio combines :

• Enterprise Strategy & Planning
• Project Portfolio Management
• Enterprise Architecture

The leaders of these three groups need to be in sync and must have shared goals geared around value creation.

During a break, I had a chance to speak to George (us Greeks need to stick together). I discussed my project and our approach to implement SOA only for the services required to support our BPM initiative, as opposed to creating a full blown SOA implementation. He agreed that we were on the right path which will make me sleep a little better tonight. I then handed him my last business card which was crumpled and stained with spaghetti sauce. Talk about great first impressions!

There were many other meaningful lectures at the show, but this was the best one to blog about.

What is Product Development 2.0 exactly? It's an informal term I'm applying to something that online startups and traditional businesses both are increasingly doing: leveraging of mass user contributions, providing open architectures for others to build on as they like, and even handing control over key product decisions directly to users. The re



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Here is an interesting article about blogging.

Keep your blog clean, express yourself, and opportunity might come knocking.

In the simplest terms: too many IT workplaces have become Dilbert-ized-micromanaged, bureaucratic and stifled creatively.



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I recently wrote two posts about the how Web 2.0 is changing the way we communicate (here and here). I recommended that organizations start paying attention to the younger generations usage of the Web because it will drive radical change. Today I read this article which backs up my argument.

The funny thing about it is that the government is passing bills to punish schools for embracing these technologies. Why? Because they don't understand the technologies.

In my last article, I talked about how the younger generation’s usage of the internet was driving a lot of the technologies that make up what is now called Web 2.0. The Gen Y and Internet Generation’s desire to stay connected with their friends has led to many social networking sites like MySpace and Flickr. Their need for chatting, instant messaging, and video has changed the way people interact and communicate through the net and through wireless devices. Blogging and tagging have become a widely popular mechanism for sharing and searching for relevant information. Kids’ websites, like Webkinz, have introduced very young children to online collaboration, rich media applications, and online shopping.

All of the above items are driving up the popularity of rich interfaces usually created in Macromedia Flash or by using AJAX. Now that developers are able to build robust, fully functional browser based applications, the desktop is becoming less important (Microsoft is Dead). I ended the discussion warning that managers need to “think like” or pay attention to what the younger generation is doing on the web.

Why? Look how technologies like portals and instant messaging started. Plumtree Portal (now BEA Aqualogic), was founded by then 25 year old Glen Kelman who spawned the portal idea from his usage of My Yahoo pages. Instant messaging, which is now widely used in many corporations spawned from internet chatting. Do you see where I am going? Today, blogging and tagging are already catching on as great tools for knowledge sharing. Many folks in management who are not up to speed with the world of “Web 2.0” look down on staffers who use these types of tools because they don’t understand the significance of it. If managers would start paying attention to what millions of people are doing on the web they would realize that technologies like social networking will soon start revolutionizing the way companies communicate with each other. It might take a few years for this to catch on but it will.

So I conclude this two part article with this message. Start thinking like the younger generation and go out and explore the tools that millions of kids are using on the net today. More and more companies are starting Web 2.0 initiatives so start educating your management now before they get left behind.

For more info, the best blog I have seen by far on this topic is Don Hinchcliffe’s Enterprise Web 2.0.

Enterprise Architecture: Thought Leadership: Do Enterprise Architects Care?

I have been consumed in research on the topic of Web 2.0 the last few weeks. All of my research keeps bringing me back to the generation of kids born in the 80’s and 90’s. I sometimes wonder what my life would be like if I was born as a Gen Y (1978-1990’s)[1] or Internet Generation (1994-2001)[2] child. Much of what is driving Web 2.0[3] is the online expectations from these two generations. My two kids, ages 10 & 8, are Internet Generation kids. Here is my assessment of their generation in terms of their online expectations and abilities:

1. Technically savvy – I am probably the only member in my family who is more capable of using technology then my kids. From the web, to IPods, to cell phones, to Tivos, etc. My kids could use almost all of the features of these technologies before they knew how to read. As a matter of fact, and I am embarrassed to admit it, my daughter at age 6 had to show me how to use the “mouse” feature of my Nano when I first bought it. So much for my dual computer science degrees!

2. Technical from birth – This is slightly redundant from my first point, but I do want to point out that they resist nothing that is new. When they see something new, they embrace it. When I look at my parents’ generation, when they see something new they run from it. Do all of the clocks in your parents’ house still flash 12:00?

3. Short attention span – If it doesn’t work, if it’s too complex, or if it takes too long, they are gone.

4. Advertising is break time – They are accustomed to fast forwarding the TiVo, Adblock, and various other technologies that don’t force them to sit through or click through commercials.

5. Independent – They don’t need assistance, directions, or user manuals. They are very resourceful and learn with their eyes.

6. Low budget – Actually no budget. They don’t have cash, and they know that if they want something they have to perform some painful duty (takeout the trash, clean their room) to earn it. So they are accustomed to doing things at no or low cost.

Now take a step back and see how these characteristics apply to Web 2.0. Throw in Gen Y’s social networking demands[4] and you have described many of the characteristics of Web 2.0 technologies. Now look at some of the statistics of internet usage by age in the US[5] and the UK[6]. As you can see, the younger generations are heavy users of the web.

So why do I care? I care because I think most of corporate America is missing the boat[7] when it comes to embracing technologies like instant messaging, blogs, tagging, social networking, and AJAX to name a few.[8] How many of you have a magazine rack full of paid subscriptions to various trade magazines at your work? Do people actually still read these things? The younger generations and those of us who are “web 2.0 aware” use RSS feeds[9] to get the news that we want. If you depend heavily on main stream news and paid subscription services, you probably don’t really know what’s going on. These sources are controlled and influenced by big money. Blogging is free and Democratic. Here is an excerpt from Paul Graham’s article Web 2.0:

The second big element of Web 2.0 is democracy. We now have several examples to prove that amateurs can surpass professionals, when they have the right kind of system to channel their efforts. Wikipedia may be the most famous. Experts have given Wikipedia middling reviews, but they miss the critical point: it's good enough. And it's free, which means people actually read it. On the web, articles you have to pay for might as well not exist. Even if you were willing to pay to read them yourself, you can't link to them. They're not part of the conversation.

Another place democracy seems to win is in deciding what counts as news. I never look at any news site now except Reddit. I know if something major happens, or someone writes a particularly interesting article, it will show up there. Why bother checking the front page of any specific paper or magazine? Reddit's like an RSS feed for the whole web, with a filter for quality. Similar sites include Digg, a technology news site that's rapidly approaching Slashdot in popularity, and del.icio.us, the collaborative bookmarking network that set off the "tagging" movement. And whereas Wikipedia's main appeal is that it's good enough and free, these sites suggest that voters do a significantly better job than human editors.

The most dramatic example of Web 2.0 democracy is not in the selection of ideas, but their production. I've noticed for a while that the stuff I read on individual people's sites is as good as or better than the stuff I read in newspapers and magazines. And now I have independent evidence: the top links on Reddit are generally links to individual people's sites rather than to magazine articles or news stories.

My experience of writing for magazines suggests an explanation. Editors. They control the topics you can write about, and they can generally rewrite whatever you produce. The result is to damp extremes. Editing yields 95th percentile writing—95% of articles are improved by it, but 5% are dragged down. 5% of the time you get "throngs of geeks."

On the web, people can publish whatever they want. Nearly all of it falls short of the editor-damped writing in print publications. But the pool of writers is very, very large. If it's large enough, the lack of damping means the best writing online should surpass the best in print. And now that the web has evolved mechanisms for selecting good stuff, the web wins net. Selection beats damping, for the same reason market economies beat centrally planned ones.

Even the startups are different this time around. They are to the startups of the Bubble what bloggers are to the print media. During the Bubble, a startup meant a company headed by an MBA that was blowing through several million dollars of VC money to "get big fast" in the most literal sense. Now it means a smaller, younger, more technical group that just decided to make something great. They'll decide later if they want to raise VC-scale funding, and if they take it, they'll take it on their terms.

I will continue this topic in part II of my next article where I discuss how IT management, who are typically in their late 30’, 40’s, or 50’s, need to start thinking more like their kids’ generation and start embracing Web 2.0 before they become as outdated as their old bell bottom jeans.

I ran across this article and just had to pass it on in case you missed it.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/27/john-mccains-myspace-page-hacked/

A good buddy of mine forwarded me this article from eWeek by Deborah Perelman. The following quote from the article summarizes the content: “In the simplest terms: too many IT workplaces have become Dilbert-ized—micromanaged, bureaucratic and stifled creatively. It's become an environment where busy work is praised and morale is low.” The article talks about IT as a commodity with trends in outsourcing. Flextronics CEO, Michael Marks, goes one step further in this Businessweek Online article Design is a Commodity. He recommends outsourcing the engineering process for electronics.

How did we get here? In my opinion, IT has done this to itself through the years due to the following reasons:

1) Not working closely with the business

2) Inability to successfully manage projects

Let’s talk about the first point. In the 60’s and 70’s, the business was dependent on IT for information. There were no high powered PCs and the Internet was not for commercial use. Most of what IT worked on in the public sector was business enabling applications. During the 80’s and 90’s, huge advancements in processor speed, memory, and disk technology enabled personal computers to do the work of the massive mainframes from the previous decades. Then the internet came of age which changed the way people and businesses interact with one another. These two important technology advancements changed business for the better but not without consequences. The days of IT being in control with centralized and reliable systems gave way to the complex, distributed, and multi platform environments that we live in today. This in turn, directed a lot of IT’s attention towards infrastructure projects. In today’s world, a large portion of IT budgets go into projects and services that keep the lights on for the company (email, voice & telecommunications, security, compliance, etc.) and do not contribute to additional revenue. In addition, software vendors started delivering shrink wrapped solutions (ERP, CRM, Financial applications, etc.) that was not feasible for companies to build internally. I believe these factors have all contributed to the fact that many IT shops have become disconnected and/or out of touch or alignment with the business. IT has become perceived more as a cost center then an enabler. Employees have become known as what Catbert calls “Headcount”.

Point #2. The PMI Institute states that 72% of IT projects they studied were late, over budget, lacking functionality, or never delivered. Of the 28% “successful” projects, 45% were over budget and 68% took longer then planned. These numbers are frightening! Lack of project management best practices have caused many companies to lose faith in IT. Many business units have started buying their own software packages or paying outside vendors to solve their business problems. This is another reason why IT and the business have become unaligned.

When a company views IT as an expense and not as an enabler, the IT shop becomes a poster child for Dilbert cartoons. Companies tend to look for ways to reduce or eliminate expenses. Once you view your employees as “headcount”, the creativity, passion, and drive gets drained right out of you.

So is IT doomed? Many experts believe that in order for companies to stay competitive and survive in the upcoming years, IT needs to focus on business processes. In the article, The How, Why, and Where of Future I.T., Mark Gibb’s states that, “I.T. has to be able to show that it delivers a real return on investment.” To accomplish that, I believe that IT should start embracing:

1) Project management – to improve delivery and communication

2) Portfolio management – to maximize IT investments, align priorities w/business, and control workloads

3) Business process management – to optimize and automate business processes

4) Enterprise architecture – to align technology with corporate goals and strategies

5) Change management - to manage change and impacts on people and processes

6) Agile development – to deliver value early and often

What are your thoughts?

How many times have we seen high profile people do things that contradict the messages that they send to us? We have seen a homeland security official stalking teenagers on MySpace, we have seen athletes deny taking performance enhancing drugs only to be proved guilty, and we have seen laws like the Patriot Act, which was supposed to protect us, actually violate our civil liberties. What does this have to do with technology you might ask? Well the lesson learned here is if you say one thing but do the other, the people who follow you lose faith and your initiatives fail.

The same holds true in corporate America. When a visionary leader attempts to implement a culture changing initiative like business process management, agile development, or a new project management methodology, they must practice what they preach. I have seen several attempts to implement standard software methodologies, like CMM, fail. Why do they fail? Because the visionary leader didn't practice what he preached. In this example, the visionary preached that by adopting CMM, IT would be more successful in delivering projects. Unfortunately, implementing CMM was not carried out like a project. No scope was defined, no communication plan was developed, no stakeholders or executive sponsor was named. Instead , a boat load of documents were thrust on the IT staff. Of course, there was mass resistance and the initiative failed. Had the visionary practiced what he preached and used CMM to implement CMM his chances for success would have greatly increased.

Practice what you preach applies to those trying to implement SOA for the first time. You probably sold management that some of the advantages of SOA are speed to market and agility. The CEO was so excited by your presentation that he freed up a boat load of funds to launch your SOA initiative. Guess what? It's now time to get agile. Practice what you preach. Throw away your old waterfall approach. Gone are the days of 6-8 month deliverables. Start delivering early and often. If you don't change your ways, the CEO will quickly lose faith in this initiative quicker the you can say WMD.

If you are one of the many enterprise architects who have great visions of what SOA can do for your organization, but can't find anyone in the organization to provide the financial support needed to bring SOA to realization, listen to this real life story of how you can get the business to go to bat for you.

A medium sized company, who will remain unnamed, was supporting a sophisticated, proprietary supply chain system that was taking an army of developers to keep it running. The business was changing rapidly and the demands for new features and enhancements were far exceeding development's ability to meet the customers' needs. The system was several years old and needed to be integrated with several other silo legacy systems. The UI was not user friendly and was in dire need of workflow capabilities. The business wanted something to change but did not want to sign up for another long painful rewrite. So IT turned this liability into a win-win proposition for both the business and IT. Here's how.

First, IT put together a cost/benefit analysis for only the IT side of the equation. There was a huge opportunity to reduce the amount of resources required to maintain the legacy system while providing business value by improving speed to market, increasing new development capacity, and improving quality. When presenting their findings, the IT group pointed out that they thought there were even more substantial opportunities on the business side of the equation if the business would evaluate their existing, 20 year old processes.

After convincing key executives in both the business and IT that a large opportunity existed, the business funded the first phase of this initiative and brought in an outside firm to perform a business process analysis. In just 90 days, the current state and future state business processes were modeled and a few compelling opportunities were discovered. What the business discovered after interviewing numerous people throughout the organization, including several customers, was that their existing processes where not only costing more then twice of what the future state would cost, but they were potentially limiting the company's ability to create more sales.

At the end of this phase, the major IT and business stakeholders held a future state design meeting. In this meeting, the business discussed specific use cases that they needed in the future state that would allow them to reduce costs and increase revenue. For each use case, IT would describe the technology required to satisfy the use case. The use cases contained items like wizard based data entry forms, visibility into orders, B2B web interface, operational reporting, and integration with several legacy systems. IT was able to map those use cases to a BPMS/SOA solution to create a robust, user friendly, workflow system that could be deployed rapidly without rebuilding years of legacy systems. What the business heard was BPMS and SOA would answer their prayers.

The next step was to sell the CEO and his leadership team on how the company could be transformed by reevaluating its business processes and applying BPMS and SOA to help the business achieve its goals. It was the business and IT, hand in hand, selling this idea to the executives. The sell was easy and the company has moved on to the next phase with sufficient funding and executive level support.

I know this was a long story but here is the point. The IT team knew for 3 years that a BPMS and SOA solution was the answer to the problems that they faced each day. But IT had not figured out how to sell it and how to fund it. Finally, the pain became so great that IT realized that they had to figure out a way to sell these concepts to the business. First they showed that the cost/benefit just in IT was substantial. This got people's attention. Once they got people's attention, they were able to engage the business and gave the business ownership of transforming the company. Once the business had bought in, the rest was history. So what is the moral of the story? Aligning technology with real business cases increases your ability to sell technology to those who write the checks.

Many companies in the early phases of the project management maturity model rely totally on ROI (or sometimes gut feelings) to prioritize their projects. But does ROI tell the entire story? The ROI is just one piece of the business case that should be presented before a project gets approved as part of a company's portfolio. There are at least four categories of business drivers that should be considered:

1) Financial Analysis
2) Strategic Alignment
3) Tactical Importance
4) Risk Mitigation

When looking at the financial aspect of a project, key metrics like Net Present Value (NPV), ROI, Payback Period, Cost Avoidance, Cost Reduction, and Opportunity Costs should be considered. Things to consider in the Strategic Alignment category are business fit, customer retention or growth, revenue growth, new markets, customer satisfaction, or other important business drivers that come straight from the company's goals & objectives. Then there are the tactical drivers like improved performance or quality, longevity, competency enhancing, competitive impacts, improving time to market, or first to market to name a few. The fourth category is for business drivers that mitigate risks for business issues. Regulatory compliance (SOX, HIPAA, etc.), business continuity, disaster recovery, security, and patent protection are a few that come to mind.

Each company should have specific business drivers that fall into these four categories. All of these drivers should be evaluated in the business case that gets presented to the business owners of the portfolio. The business should tailor the specific drivers within each category to meet the overall company goals and objectives. Then weights should be assigned to each business driver.

Here is an example: Let's say that Strategic fit is a driver you wish to measure. You can apply a weight of 1 for low, 2 for medium, and 3 for high. For ROI or NPV, set some thresholds for low, medium, and high (low < $1M, Med < $10MM, High >=$10MM for a small company). After entering in all the weighted business drivers, sum up the total for each project and you get the Net Weighted Portfolio Value (NWPV).

If your company does not own robust portfolio tools, you can simply use Excel. To test this out, take what you think are the top 10 projects in your company and enter all of this data in the spreadsheet. Then sort by the NWPV and see how this compares to the original top 10. You might be surprised.

Keep in mind that the NWPV is for guidance purposes only. The CFO's pet project may still be #1 but at least you gave him visibility into the value of all of the projects in your portfolio. The intent is to put all projects on a level playing field so you can use more then the standard ROI or gut feel to prioritize your IT investments.

References
Kaplan, J. (2005). Strategic IT portfolio management: Governing enterprise transformation. PRTM,Inc.

Handler, R., & Maizlish, B (2005). IT portfolio management: Unlocking the business value of technology. John Wiley & Sons.

The new craze in America is a heavy diet of BlackBerry. BlackBerry for breakfast, BlackBerry for lunch, BlackBerry for dinner, BlackBerry during meetings, BlackBerry in line at Disney, you get the point. How have we become so addicted to our BlackBerry mobile devices?

I was recently at a BPMS Summit in San Diego. Every morning for breakfast they herded us like cattle into the breakfast area where they set up "networking" tables by industry. I sat down at the CPG industry table expecting to start up some meaningful "networking" discussions with some of my customers and peers. What I found was six people at my table buried in their BlackBerries. "Good Morning", I said. Four of the six looked up, smiled and acknowledged my existence. Then they hurried back to their life support systems in case they missed in email in that brief second that I interrupted. I started eating my breakfast as all eyes focused on their life support system with their fingers working their magic on these evil devices. After a few minutes of silence (other then me munching on my granola) I asked, "How have you liked the summit so far?", to the lady to my right. She peeked up and said it was nice. After another minute of small talk she hurried back to her wireless addiction.

I attended session after session of really good information about BPMS, SOA, change management, and many other topics for the next 3 days. What amazed me is that several people spent $1800 in conference fees plus T&E just so they could read their BlackBerries in the Sheraton Hotel in San Diego. What's up with that?

Maybe I am too old school. After all, I have only owned a Tivo for 8 months now. Have you ever spent hours getting your Power Point ready for a meeting only to find a bunch of people tuning you out to their BlackBerry when you speak? Have you ever sent emails to someone who you know is in an important meeting and get an instant reply? There ain't a whole lot of listening going on!

Let's do some math. Let's say the average senior management type person gets 120 emails a day (probably a very conservative number). In an 8-hour day that's 15 emails an hour or an email every 4 minutes. If that person is on a heavy diet of BlackBerry, how much information other then the emails is that person actually processing throughout the day? Not much. Maybe that's why they need so much email....to get them up to date on what's going on.

I have read in so many books, articles, and blogs that email is no longer a good form of communication. If you really want to get a message across you need face to face interactions and you need to establish relationships. That is exactly the opposite of what the BlackBerry Diet gives you. So I ask all of my fellow bloggers, is the Blackberry Diet ruining corporate America's ability to communicate effectively? Or, am I just behind the curve like I was with the Tivo?

I am beginning a long journey to implement both a BPMS and SOA solution at work. What I am finding out is that the technology is the easy part (and it is not all that easy). The real key to success is change management. The reason I say that is when I list out and rank the barriers to success, the top 5 are not related to technology. Number one: Resistance to change. Number 2: Becoming a process centric culture. Number 3: Governance. Number 4: Conflicting project priorities. Number 5: Lack of in-house skills.

If you look at this list you can see that all of these issues are related to people and processes. Change management, by definition, is managing the human aspects of change. The 5 barriers I listed are all issues that need to be addressed by either changing the culture, changing the organization structure or processes, or by training people. If we don't address all of these issues up front, then our chance of success is greatly reduced.

I am confident that we will successfully tackle the technical challenges, but we will need some help with the big 5! Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

A few years back, many "experts" were telling us to build systems to last. Fast forward to 2007 and the message is clear: Build to Change!

In the age of the ever demanding users, requirements change quicker then the ink dries on your last requirements document. In the days of "Build to Last" we would anticipate every users' needs and build the "ultimate" solution so that we would not have to spend a fortune maintaining it. The end result, we built more stuff to maintain then we should have.

Taking the Build to Last approach is like buying your 4 year old adult clothes hoping that they grow into it. Technology is changing so rapidly you can't possibly anticipate user needs. Take the IPod for example. Do you think that you have purchased your last MP3 player when you bought your Nano? Did you realize that in 3-5 years a hard disk will be a thing of the past like my old 8-track player. 3-5 years from now you will be laughing about only being able to store 4000 songs on your IPod and you actually had to burn songs to disk instead of virtualizing them in memory. In fact, the only device you will carry will be a phone and it will be your debit card, MP3 player, mobile computer, and much more.

So, my point is, don't try to think too far out in the future because the future will be totally different. Build to Change and move towards a service oriented architecture. That way, when the technology changes, your business processes and rules can easily adapt to the new and emerging technologies of tomorrow.

As vendors start embracing SOA, Software as a Solution (Saas) will become commonplace in the near future.

Every tech magazine has article after article on SOA and how its transforming businesses. Companies selling packaged software are early adopters of SOA. If you take a step back and put your Tivo on slow mo, can you see what the next wave is? In my opinion its SaaS. As vendors continue to create more process centric and service enabled products, it is becoming increasingly easier to integrate not only with the 3rd party packages but with services within those packages. If payroll is not your core competency, why fill your data center up with servers and packaged software when you can call payroll services from the vendor's computer center and display the contents in your own portal? Look at all the money you can save by not having to manage and maintain the application, the servers, and monitor the performance. No need to pay for disaster recovery or business continuity, the vendor can provide all of that. How much money can you save in electricity, human resources, floor space ,etc.?

Has the light bulb come on yet? How is this different from hosted solutions known as the ASP? In the ASP model, the software solutions are confined behind the vendors walls. Your applications cannot directly communicate with these systems. What's worse is you probably have some ugly batch extract processes that feed data between your enterprise and the vendor. Then you have batch jobs that run at night and post updates. This can create synchronization issues and move you further away from the goal of having "real-time" data. With SaaS, your systems can integrate seamlessly with the vendors services and the need for the ugly extract processes go away. The SaaS solutions can integrate with your systems real-time making the user experience much more productive.

Is it here yet? Almost. Most vendors are in the early stages of the SOA maturity model. I predict that in the next 3-5 years, SaaS will be as common as the IPod is today. For now, all we can do is plan for the future. So, get your applications service oriented now so you will be ready for the SaaS age.