|
| |
| e-INSIDER |
December 27, 2006 |
- High-Tech Outlook 2007: Increased IT Investments To Focus on Becoming Demand Driven
From AMR Research/Eric Austvold
High-tech companies were looking to aggressively increase their investment in IT the coming year, an April 2006 AMR Research study found. In "Invest in the Future Now: IT Spending To See Double-Digit Growth the Coming Year," we reported that 76% (of surveyed respondents) plan to increase IT spending the next 12 months. The average budget growth is expected to be 19.5%.
However, when the reality of budget season approached, data for AMR Research's upcoming U.S. Enterprise IT Spending Report found the sentiment still there, albeit tempered. High-tech companies in particular are more likely to increase their IT budgets, but at a moderate level. 59% of participants plan to increase spending in 2007 at a 4.1% growth, up from last year's 42% planning to increase at a rate of 3.2% respectively.
While moderate, this increase still says two things about the economic environment today. First, future forecasted business is favorable, and companies are willing to reinvest in the business. Second, companies believe productivity gains can be made by investing in IT, especially in fragmented supply networks more often found in the high-tech industry.
In another survey of 51 high-tech firms, we asked questions about their demand-driven supply network (DDSN) abilities and maturity. We identified the leaders among those that outperformed their peers in realizing benefits from implementing the fundamental elements of the demand-driven supply network. For more information on the most relevant elements that influence a company's demand-driven abilities see "The Handbook for Becoming Demand Driven."
The increase in IT investments for high-tech manufacturers will target the following demand-driven areas that leading high-tech manufacturers perform better than their peers. We predict that high-tech investments will target the enhancement of a company's ability to do the following:
Review demand forecasts more frequently. The leading 8% of high-tech companies review demand forecasts daily, 2% sense in near real time.
Sense changes in demand more quickly. While no respondents reported the ability to react to daily or hourly changes in demand, 39% reported they could sense changes with a one-to-two week lead time.
Evaluate supply network design regularly. The top 18% of high-tech firms redesign their network at least twice a year, 2% quarterly.
Employ a higher percentage of contract manufacturers. 14% state a greater than 50% reliance on outsourced manufacturing partners.
Experience greater success when launching new products. 18% report success with greater than 60% of their product launches.
Use customer created scorecards to manage performance. 20% state that scorecard data is readily available and a guiding force in supply chain decisions.
Become more prescient when estimating manufacturing costs. 31% report that costs are very predictable and closely controlled.
The significant year-over-year increase is not surprising. Each of these areas can be directly linked to improved business performance. Our benchmarking research has repeatedly reported that clients that make these investments often enjoy the profound benefits of delivering 20% more perfect orders, holding one-third less inventory, and reducing costs by as much as 5% of revenue.
Our 2006 U.S. Enterprise IT Spending Report will detail the technologies and applications in which high-tech firms are investing. We encourage readers to check out the Report as well as plan to attend our upcoming AMR Research Executive Leadership Conference, "The IT Revolution: Finished? Or Just Beginning?." Keynote speaker Alan Greenspan will give his views on how technology is driving productivity and deliver an outlook for IT innovation and business competition.
http://www.amrresearch.com
Retail Outlook 2007: Demand-Driven Retailing Takes Center Stage
From AMR Research
With recent economic reports of a happy holiday for retailers this season, our attention quickly turns to identifying the key strategies retailers should focus on to become more demand driven in 2007.
A recent survey of 102 U.S. retailers regarding their 2007 technology spending plans shows that IT budgets are expected to rise 3.5%. Retailers across vertical segments will target their 2007 IT investments on seamless cross-channel operations, consumer-centric merchandising, product development, and lean replenishment to effectively sense, shape, and fulfill customer demand.
Here we take a closer look at retail spending in these demand-driven strategies and also review how technology investments will lead to improved operations, heightened brand differentiation, and increased revenue the coming year.
Delivering cross-channel consistency fuels unprecedented spending
Our recent research regarding store productivity where we surveyed 72 U.S. retailers shows that they plan to increase their overall store technology spending by 13.9% in 2007. Much of the software spending will be focused on the following four areas.
Advanced point of sale (aPOS)
This integrated suite of applications allows for real-time access to information and transactions when and where needed. It also empowers store associates by putting tools and information at their fingertips, and delights customers by creating an efficient and personalized experience.
To achieve this, the store productivity survey showed that 52% of retailers plan to upgrade their current POS software within the next 36 months, while another 31% are already in progress. This represents a resounding 83% of retailers that are immersed in a next-generation POS software initiative.
While this good news is tempered by the historical fact that real spending has always lagged behind intent, our anecdotal evidence supports the fact that retailers plan tremendous POS software expenditures through 2009.
Workforce and task management
Our survey shows that 33% plan to upgrade or replace their existing workforce management systems in 2007. Leading retailers shape empowered and productive store employees, using new web-based workforce management (WFM) applications to ensure enterprise visibility, control, and standards.
These browser-accessed systems centrally manage data and processes such as business rules, demand drivers, employee hierarchy, labor standards, union laws, and workflow. This results in more accurate forecasting of demand, consistent scheduling processes, streamlined store execution, and effective labor management across the chain.
Customer intelligence and loyalty
While the concept of loyalty programs makes sense, the reality is that many programs end up simply reducing margins without delivering on their top goals: increasing the loyalty and influencing the buying behavior of a retailer's most profitable customers.
While retailers report benefits from their programs, research we conducted with RIS News this past spring shows that 68% of those with loyalty programs plan on revamping them over the next 18 months.
E-commerce
72% of respondents to the recent annual AMR Research/National Retail Federation Retail IT Benchmarking Study plan to improve or replace their existing e-commerce technology this year in order to provide more innovative cross-channel catalog management and order capturing.
Note, however, that retailers are not doing regular upgrades to newer versions, but fully ripping and replacing their e-commerce infrastructure.
Retailers will beef up capabilities to execute consumer-centric merchandising
In the drive to offer a more targeted or localized product assortment built around well-defined customer segments, retailers have recognized that their legacy planning and transaction systems fall short in supporting the analytics and granular execution that is now required.
Advanced retail planning leads all merchandising categories with 66% of retailers planning to significantly add to or replace existing applications, according to the AMR Research/National Retail Federation study. Item (54%) and price management (47%) functionality are close behind, as these provide the key to executing against consumer-centric strategies.
2007 will see the continuation of merchandising and marketing functions becoming more integrated, with many companies creating a single vice-president-level position that owns both groups. More advanced companies are now thinking about assortment plans designed around customer groups as an alternate hierarchy in addition to the typical product hierarchy. They are also infusing attribute-based analysis into product and store-clustering decisions. Traditional top-down planning and volume group clustering have limitations, so look for more predictive and insightful attributes, such as climate, location type, competition, and demographics that are being used to determine the optimal local product mix.
This advanced planning approach is also affecting transaction systems, since many legacy applications can't handle the depth in granularity or new business rules that are being employed. Retailers updating item management systems will likely provide greater flexibility in product attributing, hierarchy definition, and data management.
Master data management (MDM) initiatives and the expansion of global data synchronization are also fueling the fire for more sophisticated merchandise management backbones. To get the most out of any current or future optimization initiative, expect improvements in other foundational systems, such as price management and execution (including rules-based pricing) that support the move to regional and local pricing.
Retailers want to close the gap between planning and advanced pricing functionality, with price--regular, promotion, and markdown--tightly woven into the product planning process. We'll be tracking the vendors to see if they respond in the coming year.
Need for better data to improve demand response behind retail ERP adoption
Two years ago, "retail" and "ERP" wouldn't be used in the same sentence. But as core transaction systems scaled to meet retailers' needs, and with advanced planning technologies being applied to the complex analytical needs of retail organizations, companies have been inquiring about software to run their entire enterprise.
In 2006 the frustrating answer for most retailers was "the space is still emerging." In 2007, however, retailers will press forward on a number of functional fronts while continuing to push software vendors to improve and expand retail ERP functionality.
More than 40% of respondents to our survey said the single most important business initiative affecting IT investment decisions the next 12 months is better utilization of data and analysis across the business organization to improve demand response and customer experience. This in turn leads to increased lifetime value of the customer.
In 2007 retailers will continue to explore retail ERP providers and balance the opportunity to layer on advanced planning and optimization to gain some of these benefits for a solid core foundation on which to layer them. This foundation is a necessary building block because disjointed underlying systems prevent enterprise visibility into demand patterns, inventory statuses, and performance issues.
Speed and visibility top factors in new product introduction spending
2007 will see major growth in private brands among many retailers, department stores, and big boxes alike. Private brands let retailers distinguish themselves in a market and give them incremental margin and greater supply chain control that they can't always get from their national or branded supply base. With these benefits, however, comes the difficulty of operating like a manufacturer and bringing new products to market in the most responsive but efficient way possible.
We expect retailers of all types will embrace product lifecycle management (PLM) applications to support the complex processes surrounding new product introduction. We have been watching the adoption of PLM in the retail space for a couple of years, and many companies are now actively pursuing this application set.
While functionality differs slightly by product category, such as soft goods, grocery, and hard goods, retailers are looking to PLM tools for visibility and process control around asset management, product data management (PDM) bill of materials, specification management, and the entire product introduction cycle.
CAD and PDM applications have long been used by development teams but many of the critical development processes and status-tracking activities have been managed using spreadsheets. Global and collaborative processes require a much more robust application for storing data and decisions. Retailers will embrace workflow engines and event management tools to provide process management that is critical to the launch of new products or new lines of product.
Nowhere is PLM getting more attention than in apparel, where 34% of companies plan to invest in PLM in the next 24 months, according to an AMR Research and Apparel Magazine survey. This slightly higher adoption rate than retailers in other segments is mainly due to the ever-changing nature of fashion that has retailers bringing hundreds or thousands of new items to market each season, often four or more times per year.
As companies look to reduce costs and improve their cycle times in 2007 and beyond, the link between product development and sourcing gets tighter and tighter. We may see a time in the not-too-distant future where we don't talk about these as two separate applications. Though for now they are each helping apparel companies meet significant business objectives.
Product availability--the main goal for lean replenishment software investments
Lean replenishment helps translate forecasts into accurate order quantities, allowing a retailer to react in real time to store-level demand signals and improve retail execution. In 2007 retailers will continue to connect processes to improve out of stocks and optimize overall inventory. According to our recent survey, respondents with fast-moving products--and in some cases, short lifecycle items--will embrace lean replenishment to improve the following:
Product availability through inventory, replenishment/ordering, and receiving
Overall inventory management in supply chain through advanced planning and execution
As companies recognize the valuable benefits, we are seeing supply chain departments funding a large portion of the IT projects. Inventory management and store-level demand replenishment are two notable major technology priorities. The same survey of 102 respondents revealed the following conclusions:
Inventory management--A majority of respondents currently use these systems, and usage will gain even more traction in the next year. 79% said they are currently using inventory management applications, with results showing that nearly 90% of respondents plan to use, implement, or evaluate in 2007. Research also shows that 36% will upgrade this functionality next year, with minimal displacement of incumbent vendors--only 5% have a desire to change existing vendor relationships. Survey participants plan to increase spending for this technology by 14% in 2007 (second largest store spending area behind POS), but the majority of budgets are less than $500K.
Store-level demand replenishment--While demand replenishment at the store has been a manual process (walking the floor and identifying holes on the shelf or rack), usage of technology over the next 12 months is expected to increase. In fact, 80% of respondents plan to have some software functionality to automate processes by 2007. The 20% that have no plans to review or implement this functionality will put themselves at risk for poor in-stock conditions and inventory utilization. Spending in this software category is forecasted to increase 16% in 2007, and survey results show it being the third largest store spending area behind POS and inventory management.
http://www.amrresearch.com
Is Your Enterprise Application on a Road to Nowhere?
From Technology Evaluation/Dan Matthews
Your business changes continuously. You add and drop service or product lines. Your customers demand new and challenging levels of flexibility or integration with their operations. New laws and regulations require that you track more and more data on your operations in highly specific formats. And there is the relentless demand to increase operational efficiency and product quality year after year while reducing costs. How do you keep up with these demands?
If your enterprise application cannot change as fast as, or faster than, your business, it actually hinders you from achieving your goals. This means that your application vendor must, like you, continue to make changes and improvements. Yet because of recent developments in the enterprise applications market, your application vendor may no longer be investing in the product it sold you or may be making changes and improvements too slowly to help you remain competitive.
Two market forces are affecting the enterprise applications market: consolidation and inertia. Consolidation among application vendors has left some vendors with a large number of products that cannot all survive. That means most or all of them may not receive further investment in research and development. Other application vendors have invested heavily in their existing technology, and inertia may be keeping them from updating and evolving their applications.
Consolidation is a well-documented trend and is to be expected in a maturing market such as the market for enterprise applications. In its wake, many products may be widowed or orphaned, having been purchased by conglomerates that may not intend to continue investing in research and development.
Other enterprise application products have been purchased by vendors that plan to replace them entirely with a new platform, but may not have a reliable timeline for doing so.
The ownership of other enterprise applications may still be in the hands of the companies that developed them, but how do you know whether the owner intends to invest the necessary dollars to move the product forward, adding new functionality and adapting to changing technology? If a vendor has made extensive investments in its old technology and has a substantial user base, it may be especially reluctant to make the changes necessary to truly evolve the product. This article traces the evolution of the enterprise software market, focusing particularly on the much-publicized and truly revolutionary technology known as service-oriented architecture (SOA). It concludes by outlining the key questions you should ask application vendors about their future plans for the products they are marketing.
Wholesale change in the enterprise applications market has taken place in fits and starts, driven by leaps forward in technology. In the 1980s, there was a technological leap from enterprise applications built on character- and terminal-based systems to those built on a client/server model with a graphical user interface (GUI). Today, there is a similar revolution taking place as these client/server applications are, or are about to be, replaced by applications built on SOA.
SOA implies an application architecture made up of loosely coupled "services" (for example, the various software features used in creating and processing a customer order), and service "consumers" (for example, the users and applications that need to create customer orders). Most business software applications can create customer orders. But a business application made up of services enables you to easily connect the processes needed to create customer orders and then configure the steps that must be taken to create them. The loosely coupled nature of SOA services also means it is relatively easy to substitute the components that implement each step in the process. This process tends to be rigid in non-SOA applications, which is a major factor behind SOA's popularity.
An SOA-based architecture works in much the same way as your Web browser when you access functionality through the Internet. Regardless of whether you are using Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox, or Opera, and no matter which version of the browser you are using, you can access information and interact with systems on the Web. The relationship between your browser and Web sites, databases, applets, and other executable files on the Internet is loosely defined. Web site functionality may change without affecting the rest of the Web or your browser.
Similarly, the various features in a SOA-based application environment are relatively self-contained and are not overly reliant on the entire system. This functional autonomy allows individual portions of an application to be changed or updated more easily and less expensively than would be the case with an application built on monolithic blocks of code.
The modular design of a SOA-based application means it can be implemented or upgraded in phases, with minimal disruption to the end user. In contrast, a traditional monolithic application must be implemented in its entirety, and if portions of the system are not used right away, they are "switched off." This increases the complexity of the implementation. From a development standpoint, an SOA-based application is well suited for rapid, continuous change.
This new system architecture philosophy enables application end users to open up their applications by exposing the individual pieces of functionality as services, and to configure and reconfigure these services through a standard interface using technologies such as business process execution language (BPEL).
This is the way that the industry is going. But moving in this direction requires a reengineering of the application that is much more complex than the transformation from a character-based to a GUI-based system.
Most applications on the market have not been through the transition to components, which is necessary for end users to take full advantage of SOA. In some cases, application vendors have opened "plug points" into their applications where services can be exposed. These services tend to cover the types of processes handled for the past twenty years by electronic data interchange (EDI). Data for processes such as order taking, order response, invoicing, and currency exchange is available as services through these plug points. SAP, Oracle, IBM and other vendors are offering a variety of SOA middleware products, and they're getting better and better. Nevertheless, these applications do not offer the exposed services necessary to take advantage of these tools outside EDI-type processes. A company may have the budget to pay an application vendor or a system integrator to build new services that expose the functionality to its needs, but as its needs change and new services need to be exposed, the company may end up going far over budget. What the company really needs is an application that already has all its functionality exposed as services so it can freely and easily reconfigure the application to meet its changing needs--without incurring major, unanticipated expenses at every turn.
Although SOA is the primary trend in enterprise applications, other technology and functionality will be important in the years ahead. Some of these features, which users are already demanding, will require extensive investment.
One such feature is the type of text-based deep search functionality made popular by search engines such as Google. Deep search enables application users to search all the data within their enterprise applications using specific keywords or phrases. Developing a deep search tool for an application is a daunting task. But it is even more challenging for a vendor that markets more than one product. Each product has its own architecture, and a vendor with ten products must engineer a deep search tool ten times, taking into account the way information is stored and managed in each application. This is why many software vendors cannot afford to add deep search functionality--or for that matter, make any investments in their diverse product portfolios.
Another investment that many application vendors plan to make is integration between their enterprise applications and office suites such as Microsoft Office. Most people spend a great deal of time working in both the enterprise suite and their word processor, spreadsheet application, and other productivity tools. Bringing word processing, spreadsheets, and other documents together adds value. When you are e-mailing and chatting in a program outside your enterprise application, you likely are discussing a product or project and would like to be able to tie those communications into the appropriate activities within your enterprise application. The Excel spreadsheet you are working on may contain the quarterly budget forecast, or it might relate to the marketing plan. It would be nice to be able to import that information seamlessly back into the enterprise application. In fact, wouldn't it be better if the enterprise application also kept track of the spreadsheet so you wouldn't need to worry about where the latest revision is or who may have access to it? To get the most value from the loosely coupled communications outside the enterprise application, you need to keep more information within the broader business context that the enterprise application provides.
Enterprise applications also are becoming more vertical in their orientation. Although most enterprise applications offer functionality suitable for a variety of industries, some software providers are adding more and more industry-specific functionality. Over time, these industry extensions, as they are called, make the application a better fit for companies in certain industries. A vendor with several disparate products has a hard time investing in each product and may not be willing to deepen its relationship with customers in specific industries.
Because there are different types of application vendors in the market, there are different questions you should ask of each. For convenience, we will divide the enterprise software market into two types of vendors: collectors and unified technology companies.
Collectors are enterprise software companies that are growing rapidly through acquisition. Oracle and Infor Global Solutions are good examples. Oracle became the number-two enterprise applications vendor behind SAP with the 2003 purchase of JD Edwards and PeopleSoft. The company's plans to replace both products with the SOA-based Fusion platform have been well-publicized, but some analysts have questioned whether Oracle has made significant progress in this regard. In the meantime, Oracle has aggressively launched various Fusion middleware products.
Infor Global Solutions became the number-three enterprise application vendor behind SAP and Oracle in 2006 with the purchase of SSA Global and Systems Union Group. Infor, a Virgin Islands (US)-based company owned by a San Francisco, California (US)-based private equity group, now owns a broad spectrum of disparate products, including Marcam, EXE Technologies, Infinium, Baan, Elevon, Ironside Technologies, Computer Associates' interBiz, MAX International, MANMAN, MAPICS, Frontstep, Mercia Software, Clarus, D&B Software, Anael, and Extensity. The company has not announced specific plans to upgrade or replace these platforms with a SOA-based product.
Here are key questions to ask collectors:
1. How do you plan to evolve this product to accommodate major market trends, including SOA?
2. If an entirely new product is being promised, when will it be available? What will the process be to migrate from the old to the new platform, and how much will this cost?
3. When will you have a standards-based search engine within the product, and how will this be accomplished?
4. How are you adapting this application to my specific industry?
5. How have you invested in this application? Discount the upgrade history of previous owners of the product. The current owner likely will have a much different posture toward the product than did the visionaries who first created and marketed it.
6. To what extent is this application built with industry-standard technologies, including Java and .NET? Proprietary programming languages, middleware, and development tools will be harder to support as the market evolves away from them.
Unified technology companies provide enterprise applications based on a single integrated platform. Examples include SAP and IFS.
- Here are key questions to ask unified technology companies:
1. How can this application be evolved to meet my needs as they change?
2. If you have not already done so, what are your plans to break down this product into many independent, granular components to create a fully functional SOA?
3. To what extent are the features and functionality you are promoting represent products that have not yet been launched or demonstrated effective in the market?
4. How are you adapting this application to my specific industry?
- 5. Can you provide examples of companies using your enterprise application that have dramatically changed their businesses, and then explain how the product has accommodated these changes?
- How much of a reimplementation process is necessary to allow for business process change?
Selecting an enterprise application is not a lifetime commitment, but it is a commitment that will last ten years or longer. Given the degree of product complexity and pressure vendors feel to sell new licenses, caveat emptor--or buyer beware--has never been better advice for software purchasers.
You can count on vendors to tell you what you want to hear about whatever products they are trying to sell you. They will claim either that their products meet your needs today or that the software will do so somewhere down the road, in a subsequent release.
It is important to keep in mind that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Vendors tend to announce their plans to release new products well in advance. Perhaps the best way to tell whether an application vendor will make good on its promises is to look at the promises it has made in the past, either in public or to individual customers. Did the company keep these promises? Did development timelines slide? Or did product roadmaps disappear entirely? Don't be afraid to ask tough questions, because the answers are critical to your selection of an enterprise application.
http://www.technologyevaluation.com
Making Sense of SOA Standards Activities
BPM Institute/Mike Rosen
- I've seen a lot of activity in the past few months around SOA standards. There's a joke that goes: "The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from". So let's review some of the recent SOA activity.
August--Open SOA Collaboration group is formed to advance work on SCA and SDO
October--OASIS Reference Model for SOA approved
December--OMG begins work on UML Profile and Metamodel for Services
So what's an architect to do? Notice that I am specifically NOT talking about Webs services standards (WS* etc.) which have their own dizzying set of events. I make a distinct difference between SOA and Web services. First, although web services are a useful technology for implementing services, they are not the only technology, and many SOAs have been built without them. Secondly, Web services tell us how to build services (the S of SOA), but SOA is also about the architecture (the A) of building applications and processes across enterprise and organizational units that are composed from multiple types of services. But I digress...
As an architect, we often talk about three types of architecture; Conceptual, Logical and Physical. Sometimes we associate the Conceptual Architecture with the business, Logical Architecture with application design, and Physical Architecture with technology. However, if we do this, we are confusing two very different concepts; viewpoints and abstraction. Enterprise Architecture is divided into several different viewpoints, typically: Business, Information, Application and Technology. These are different perspectives, or views, or ways of organizing architecture around a particular subject area or skill set. Instead, conceptual, logical and physical are different levels of abstraction that describe the amount of detail in a model. We can in fact apply these levels of abstraction to any of the traditional EA perspectives, so for example, we can have a conceptual application architecture, a logical application architecture and a physical application architecture. But I digress again... In any event, it occurs to me that this classification of abstraction is a good way to make sense of the different standards activities.
Let's start with the OASIS Reference Model for Service Oriented Architecture v1.0. The reference model document states: "a reference model is an abstract framework for understanding significant relationships among the entities of some environment. It enables the development of specific reference or concrete architectures using consistent standards or specifications supporting that environment. A reference model consists of a minimal set of unifying concepts, axioms and relationships within a particular problem domain, and is independent of specific standards, technologies, implementations, or other concrete details". That's certainly a mouthful, but let's pick out a few important words: unifying concepts and concrete details.
I think the model gets it right in terms of the unifying concepts. At the highest level, the main concepts are: Service, Visibility, Service Description, Execution Context, Real World Effect and Contract & Policy. A concept map lists the main concepts and more detailed maps introduce additional sets of concepts for each of the main concepts. The document is right up front about its purpose. It is not an architecture, a set of patterns, or any kind of technology. It is a set of concepts that occur in most SOA architectures. So, if you are going to be creating an SOA, you should consider these concepts during that process and integrate the appropriate ones into your architecture. Or if you want to compare different architectures, the reference model provides a set of concepts, or a 'common language' that allows them to be objectively compared.
How about the concrete details? There are none. The model is a set of concepts taken to a high level of abstraction. A good set of concepts at that, but I think most people will not know what to do with this reference model. It's really too bad that the good concepts gets lost in the high level of abstraction because it's an important problem that OASIS is trying to solve. But you have to start somewhere, so I applaud their initial efforts and look forward to a revised version of the reference model in the not too distant future.
The Object Management Group (OMG) has recently begun work on a Profile and MetaModel for Services. The RFP states: "What is needed is a standard for modeling services that raises the abstraction above the variability in the platforms, enables SOA concepts to be deployed on existing platforms, and provides business integration and interchange to be addressed at the architectural level... The profile will define extensions for modeling and integrating services within and across business enterprises including facilities for formal specification of service contracts...
Service modeling extend component based modeling with additional capabilities to address the effect of integration across ownership boundaries. This introduces the need to explicitly address contracts that formalize the expected interaction between service consumers and providers without coupling them to particular platforms or implementations that would inhibit business agility."
These certainly sound like laudable goals to me as an architect, and ones that fit an enterprise wide, architecturally focused definition of SOA. They also fit within the OMG's emphasis on formal modeling and integration of IT artifacts through compatible metamodels. As part of this standardization effort, the OMG will define a formal MOF metamodels to describe services, their interface and contracts, their implementation, and their traceability back to business requirements. Then, they will define a UML Profile that allows those concepts to be used within a UML modeling environment. Of course, the OMG process will take a while. Initial submissions are not due until June of 2007, but its good to see someone addressing domain specific modeling for SOA.
Mike Rosen is Chief Technical Officer at Azora Technologies, which provides products and services for SOA, integration and enterprise architecture. Mr. Rosen is also Director of Enterprise Architecture for the Cutter Consortium. His current emphasis is on the implementation of agile, flexible SOA applications that support EA and BPM. He has years of experience in the architecture and design of applications for global corporations and 20+ years of product development experience for distributed technologies.
http://www.soainstitute.org
Click here to subscribe or renew your subscription to Global Logistics & Supply Chain Strategies magazine
Back to top
|
|
|
|
|
