SOA at RUCC
The following are abstracts from a discussion of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) among the members of the Research University CIO Conclave (RUCC).
From: Shelton Waggener <shelw@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Research University CIO Conclave <rucc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 30 Aug 2009 22:09:58 -0700
SOA, SOAP, REST, WSDL....
Alphabet soup all. What is a CIO to do when your team begins arguing about the latest wave of acronyms? In preparation for this weeks RUCC meeting instead of giving you a survey that required advanced work, the "What the Heck - SOA team" is providing you with some light reading for the plane in preparation for our discussion Wednesday.
Eric Wilde, who happens to be a faculty member at Berkeley, published a paper regarding loose coupling in SOA that provides a pretty good overview and breakdown of the key issues regarding metrics, coupling and the future of software services development.
See you all Wednesday.
Shel
From: "Larry D. Conrad" <larry_conrad@xxxxxxx>
To: "shelw@xxxxxxxxxxxx" <shelw@xxxxxxxxxxxx>, "Research University CIO Conclave" <rucc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2009 08:03:43 -0400
And in addition to Shel's background paper, we want to plant some seeds for our
discussion on Wed.
SOA strikes me as a really terrific idea. In fact, at the 30,000 foot level,
this is consistent with program development goals I've seen my entire
career...the Holy Grail of reusable code/processes. My first exposure was as
an Assembler developer decades ago and with macros, then callable subroutines,
Library routines, and RPCs. Each of these has achieved some degree of success.
But in each case you had the problem of the brilliant programmer who was
convinced he/she could do a better job and went their own way.
Some possible questions about SOA to jump-start the discussion:
1) What is SOA and what's different about it?
2) Is SOA ready for "prime time," mission critical use in Higher Ed?
3) What would SOA "success" look like?
4) What software suites are people using to deploy SOA?
6) How do we organize to support SOA in our organizations?
6) What would an appropriate SOA strategy look like?
7) What "landmines" do we need to avoid in implementing SOA?
8) Where does SOA fit in the developer's "toolbox," particular for
institutions that have implemented ERP?
I'm looking forward to the discussion.
-Larry
From:rucc-bounce@freelists.org [mailto:rucc-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Morteza Rahimi
Sent: Monday, August 31, 2009 11:02 AM
To: larry_conrad@unc.edu; shelw@berkeley.edu; 'Research University CIO Conclave'
Subject: [rucc] Re: SOA at RUCC
Larry, I presented your questions to our team that oversees SOA at Northwestern. Below are their answers.
Mort
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1) What is SOA and what's different about it?
SOA is a way to create reusable services that can be used over and over again by many different enterprise systems
2) Is SOA ready for "prime time," mission critical use in Higher Ed?
SOA technology is ready for prime time, but it can only be used effectively if the institution effectively adapts itself organizationally to leverage it. Decisions and funding for enterprise systems must be done in a coordinated way among system owners so that collaboration among the enterprise systems is a major motivator in planning.
3) What would SOA "success" look like?
A library of reusable services that are actually used and actually bring business value to the business owners in the institution.
4) What software suites are people using to deploy SOA?
Northwestern began with the Oracle suite, but has run into issues with product packaging and product pricing.
6) How do we organize to support SOA in our organizations?
From a business perspective, this is addressed in (1). From an IT perspective, there must be an IT unit that manages the library of SOA services to make sure that they are reliable, clearly defined, and discoverable. There should also be a group of business people and IT people who are responsible for all governance issues and there should a be a group that defines best practices and can train others in best practices as well as the technology.
6) What would an appropriate SOA strategy look like?
A successful strategy starts small with small wins that demonstrate business value and builds from there.
7) What "landmines" do we need to avoid in implementing SOA?
Starting too big; not getting enough buy-in from the business people; not containing costs with respect to the technology solutions.
8) Where does SOA fit in the developer's "toolbox," particular for institutions that have implemented ERP?
ERP systems should have the tools that enable the developers to create services and make them available to other systems. Likewise, they should have tools that facilitate the consumption of services and the ERP staffs need to know how to use these tools.