We are in the middle of implementing our SOA Governance model. We have put together a ton of lengthy reference documents like the architect guidebook, SOA roadmap, developer guidebook, administrator handbook, and many others. Our biggest fear has been getting people to read these documents. In order to enforce our SOA best practices and standards, people must be aware of what they are. Giving people 200-300 page documents is not an effective way of sharing information.
Enter open source wiki tool, MediaWiki. With a little help from OpenOffice v.2.3, we took the lengthy Word documents and converted them to Wiki Markup to create easy to use, clickable, and searchable documents. Now our architects and developers can easily maneuver through pages of pertinent documentation without being overwhelmed by large sequential documents. In addition, people can collaborate by using the discussion feature in MediaWiki to help the architect team improve upon the documentation.
Our next step is to implement an open source blogging tool. One of our challenges today is to communicate both technical and project specific information pertaining to our SOA initiative in a timely manner. I have held a number of meetings with several IT teams to walk them though various presentations and white board sessions. Unfortunately I don't have the bandwidth to do this often enough. We will start to leverage blogging technology to share daily information about the initiatives. People who are interested will be able to subscribe to these blogs using an RSS feed reader. This is much more effective then pushing more email on people.
And finally, we will create an Enterprise Architecture community in our enterprise portal. This will allow us to bring all of our content together in a one stop shop approach. The community will display our blogs, our wiki, project status, tips & tricks, announcements, and various other information.
One of my lessons learned so far on our SOA project is that we do not communicate often enough. I believe a combination of monthly presentations and white board sessions, along with our wiki, blogs, and portal community provides multiple opportunities for people to keep up to date with our SOA initiative. I also think it is more effective to publish content and let people "pull" it on demand then to "push" it on them.
In part 1 of this series I asked the question, "Are you running IT like it's your business?" Then I highlighted five barriers for preventing IT leaders from being able to transform their IT shop into a well oiled, cost effective machine?
- Resistance to change
- Lack of resources (time, money, and human capital)
- Lack of tools
- Lack of metrics
- Lack of process
If you owned your own construction company, would you equip your workers with hammers or nail guns? Many IT shops create budgets that focus mainly on business demands and infrastructure but forget about funding tools and initiatives that increase the staff's overall productivity.
Human labor makes up a large part of IT budgets. So why not invest in tools to allow your IT professionals to deploy faster, provide more visibility into operational efficiencies, provide better access to information, and automate administrative and repetitive tasks?
If you don't want IT to be viewed as a cost center, then look for ways to make your resources more efficient. There are vendors like Mercury, Rational, and many others that provide a suite of tools from project management, to development, to testing, to change management. These tools allow you to enter requirements, automatically generate test cases, and provide visibility into requirements traceability. These can be time consuming and error prone tasks without the use of tools. If you are a .Net shop, investing in MSDN, Visual Studio Team System, and the new Silverlight product provide tremendous productivity gains. If you are developing with Java, Ruby on Rails, or a variety of other open source technologies there are a ton of great development tools and they are free! But don't stop there. There are tools for configuration management, source control, defect tracking, modeling, and the list goes on and on. If you have home grown systems to perform these duties then you don't understand the term Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Why build and maintain these types of applications when there are companies and open source communities that have massive amounts of resources and R&D efforts to continually improve these products while ensuring they meet standards and keep abreast of modern technologies? Although some of these tools can be expensive, nothing is more expensive then having IT professionals performing tasks that can be automated by these suite of tools. And let's not forget testing automation. If done right, regression testing can be fully automated and executed as part of your daily build process. How many times has development delivered a build to SQA only to have it fail simple regression tests? I have seen several days wasted as build after build is failed by SQA and returned to development. With automation, all builds should have already passed regression testing before even showing up on SQA's door step.
Investing in PPM (project portfolio management) and problem management tools gives IT professionals the ability to proactively manage projects and production support. By having visibility into the progress of projects and the health of production systems, IT can prevent issues from occurring or at least address the issues early before they become catastrophic.
Access to information is an extremely valuable tool. This is often known as Knowledge Management. Tools such as portals, collaboration, wikis, blogs, and knowledge bases, are great tools for sharing best practices, training materials, standards, and various other forms of documentation. Investing in quality search technologies can be a huge productivity enhancer. Here is an article that claims that employees performing ineffective searches and wasting time looking for information can cost companies up to 10% in salary expenses. Ten percent of your staff's salary can easily justify the costs of search technology. Some enterprise portals, like BEA's Aqualogic UI, are implementing many of the new Web 2.0 features like tagging and ranking which are an extremely effective way to present relative information to IT professionals.
And finally, how many times have you seen your development staff rapidly develop and test some new feature only to have it take days or weeks to labor through a whole host of manual processes and procedures in an effort to deploy the functionality. All of these processes should be automated through work flow, including the approvals and audit trail. The work flow provides visibility into the status of the request and can automatically deploy the features if designed correctly.
In summary, when looking at tools think about the TCO. The more effective your staff is, the lower the cost of deployment becomes. In addition, by increasing speed to market you also create more throughput. More throughput means more business value. One last note. If you are still scared of using open source for enterprise applications, there is no better place to test open source's value at low risk then with development tools.
In part 4 of this series I will discuss metrics. Stay tuned.
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.
