Mad Greek Sightings

I will be on a panel of distinguished analysts discussing the value of MDM (Master Data Management) on February 25, 2009 at noon EST. Join me, David Linthicum, and JP Morgenthal for this virtual conference. Click here for all of the details of this event.

Back in September I shared with all of you the presentation I gave about SOA and Organization Change Management. Today I am happy to share the podcast from that discussion that took place at the quarterly SOA Consortium meeting in Orlando. Here are the slides.

And here is the podcast that goes with it.

The panel discussion at the tail end of the presentation is fantastic. There were a lot of great questions and many lessons learned shared from experts like Todd Biske, Brenda Michelson, Fill Bowen from IBM, and others. If you have the time, listen to this podcast. Failure to recognize and counteract the resistance to change is the number one cause of failure for all enterprise initiatives, not just SOA.

My first article was published on BPMInstitute.org today. I have a quarterly commitment to write articles on BPM and SOA (SOAInstitute.org). This article was a case study on how CERN, an international scientific research company and pioneer of the world wide web, leveraged BPMS tools to improve efficiencies and control costs. You can read the article here.

I will be the co-presenter with colleague Jimmy Chou from Dominion Digital at the AIIM Conference in Philadelphia from March 30-April 2. I am not sure what day the presentation is yet. The topic will be Value-Driven BPM and SOA: Lessons Learned from a Leader in Behavioral-Based Marketing. We will be discussing a project that we both worked on and the process we went through to partner with the business and fund a large business process reengineering effort. This presentation will highlight a very successful effort for aligning technology with key business drivers that set the grounds for a major BPM/SOA initiative.

I was invited to speak at a forum for IT executives in Detroit this week sponsored by Information Week. The purpose of the forum as described in the agenda goes like this...

This executive breakfast, specifically designed for senior business-technology executives, will explore why the pressure is on IT to help the business transform, and how it can meet those expectations. More than ever before, companies are demanding their CIOs to be strategic thinkers in helping them innovate and operate at peak performance - especially as businesses are under pressure from the poor state of the economy and the ever-faster pace of change in a global market. In this environment, you can't miss this opportunity to gain insight into the tactics and strategy that will help you be on your best game.

I was specifically asked to talk about why transformational IT initiatives like BPM & SOA fail and what advice I would offer to prevent failures from happening. I put together the following presentation which is a combination of some of my previous presentations, Preparing for SOA and SOA & Change.

I wrote a very popular article on CIO.com a while back about the Top 10 reasons why SOA fails. I speak to each of these points in the presentation and present solutions for each. I also discuss using John Kotter's 8-step process for managing change which I highlight in the presentation. Here are my keys for preventing failures.

1. Plan for and manage organizational change


2. Key drivers should be business focused not IT focused


3. Evaluate internal skills and fill gaps. Do not try it without help!


4. Don't let the vendors drive your architecture. Do your homework.


5. Grow your governance model over time

Speaking of governance, here is an analogy I like to use...

Implementing SOA without a solid governance model is the equivalent to having an airport without a control tower. Sure, there are some very good planes and talented pilots, but without the proper planning and timely information the end results would be disastrous. So make sure you build a control tower and hire some air traffic controllers!

If you would like me to create and present a custom presentation like this one, feel free to contact me

Tomorrow at 4pm I am presenting at the annual EDM Summit in Orlando on the topic of Business Intelligence as a Service. Check out the presentation below.

This presentation is based on a real life project that I once worked on. We had a scenario where the business had a very complicated set of business rules required to determine what inventory was available to sell. Inventory for a loyalty marketing company is very dynamic and is not a physical thing like a widget. Instead it is a data mining exercise comprised of many "What-if" scenarios.

The old way of doing things was to get data from many different sources, some from systems, some from spread sheets, and some from somebody's head, and go through an ugly and error-prone process to determine what was available to sell. The process took many days which puzzled the customer why we couldn't tell them right away if we could run the program or not. Through some analysis, we defined new and improved business processes and data services that would allow our sales people to enter numerous parameters on a new web UI and let the systems return information to the screen with potential sales opportunities.

When the designers brought their solution to the architecture team for review we saw a huge opportunity to change the approach that was being recommended for the user interface. The designers were Java guys so naturally they recommended a Java web based UI (which infuriated the .Net community). But as I looked at the multiple screens that they story boarded it became obvious that building a what-if type UI was not best served by building proprietary code. Business Intelligence tools make a living doing just that. So I put a hold on the design and recommended that we brought in our BI partner for a proof of concept.

To make a long story short, we proved with our BI partner, that we could leverage the BI tool to create a robust what-if style GUI which we could talk to all of the layers of our SOA (see slides for details). In other words, we abstracted the BI tool as our presentation layer. What that gave us was all of the bells and whistles that come with BI tools like:

1. Flash enabled output
2. Subscription services
3. Mobile capabilities
4. Alerts
5. Great scalability
6. Logging
7. and much more

All of these things I mentioned above were out of the box features of the BI tool that we did not have to code in Java. In fact, we offered to the business a much more efficient solution. Instead of submitting data and reviewing rows on the screen, we offered to automate the business rules and allow them to subscribe to categories. This means that they only needed to go to the system to tell it what to look for and the system would alert them when categories were available. Now they could go into a sales meeting knowing in advance what was available to sell. When certain categories became available they could get an alert and immediately schedule a call to the appropriate customer. A future step could be to tie the alert into the CRM system.

So the key point to this story is that you can leverage BI as an abstracted layer within your SOA which will help maximize the value of your existing BI investment.

I will be participating in the SOA Sustainment Soapbox Derby at the SOA Consortium in Orlando on September 25, 2008. Here is the complete agenda for the 2 day event.

09:15 – 12:00 SOA Sustainment Soapbox Derby, SOA Practitioners

The purpose of the SOA Soapbox Derby is to allow practitioners to exchange ideas on activities that are critical to sustaining SOA success. Derby participants will have 10-15 minutes to soapbox, followed by another 15 minutes (or so) to engage in related conversation with meeting attendees.

Confirmed Soapbox Derby Participants:

• Todd Biske, Senior IT Architect, Monsanto
• Victor Harrison, Partner, CSC
• Mike Kavis, Chief Technologist / Independent Researcher
• David Miller, Embedded Software Engineer, Boeing
• Burc Oral, CTO, Cover4Me

Any practitioner attending the SOA Consortium meeting may participate in the 'SOA Soapbox Derby'. To participate, contact Brenda Michelson in advance, or onsite.

I will be discussing organizational change management as a critical success factor to a successful SOA implementation. I hope to see you there!