Learnings From My "Dead Simple SOA" Workshop on Saturday

As announced earlier, the workshop that we (my business partner Rahul Singh and I) organised on "Dead Simple SOA" took place yesterday (Saturday the 8th Dec), and here's what we learnt from it.

Fundamentally, the ideas we are trying to popularise are seen as useful and worth pursuing. That was a very welcome piece of validation. However, we do need to refine our message and target our audience better.

We got largely positive feedback from the two participants (the low registration rate is itself a symptom of poor messaging and targeting), but also some valuable feedback on how we could improve it.

1. There are two sets of messages in the workshop, and this dilutes its appeal. This is because the draft white paper on which the workshop is based ("Slicing the Gordian Knot of SOA Governance") itself deals with two separate (though related) themes.

One theme is "How to do SOA". This had a number of new and useful ideas that the participants commented favourably on.

The other theme is about "How to do SOA Governance and Management". While the ideas behind this were also appreciated, here's what seemed to be lacking:

a. This topic is of interest to a different group of people, - perhaps managers and enterprise architects, whereas "How to do SOA" is of interest to solution architects, designers and perhaps even developers.

b. There is likely to be unease over the fact that my method challenges the accepted industry view of SOA Governance as a technology-related practice, which creates dissonance and may make people reluctant to pay for a "heterodox" course. If I want my approach of governing the entire enterprise through dependency-oriented thinking to be adopted, I should rename it to something else rather than try and redefine the term "SOA Governance". That train has left the station.

I seem to have a choice here. In the candid words of one of the participants, I have to "choose whether I want to be a philosopher or to build a business". Because if I want to build a business, his suggestion was to quietly align with the industry model instead of trying to challenge it, and then make money by offering to train people in the "universally accepted way". [I do think I can carve out a niche by being different without aligning submissively with conventional thinking, but there is a point here. A "flanking" strategy of coining a new term may work better than a "head-on" strategy of challenging a widely-held set of views.]

2. We need to improve our marketing, both in reach and in targeting. I don't know if we managed to reach most of our target audience with news of the workshop, and whether they could identify themselves as the target based on the workshop brochure. We relied on our membership of various LinkedIn groups to reach the professionals we were connected to, and some of our friends helped out by relaying the message to their contacts, but I'm not sure what proportion of our target audience is reached in this way. Some more research and refinement is required here.

[Although we didn't get direct feedback on this aspect, I believe the price we are charging for a full-day workshop is reasonable ($450 plus 10% GST = $495, with an early-bird price of $400 plus GST = $440), and this includes morning and afternoon tea as well as lunch. The room and audio-visual equipment that we rented at the UTS Haymarket campus was OK, but not great. The air-conditioning couldn't be adjusted, and the data projector's screen obscured the fixed whiteboard, making it impossible to use both simultaneously. The catering was satisfactory in terms of quality but their commercial terms were somewhat unfavourable. We had to pay for a minimum of 10 people regardless, which was wasteful.]

Action items:

1. Over the next few days, I will split my draft white paper into two parts, one dealing with "How to do SOA", aimed at solution architects and designers, and the other dealing with "How to do SOA Governance and Management", aimed at enterprise architects and managers. In the latter, I will touch upon the differences between my approach and the industry definition of "SOA Governance", and use a different name for mine.

2. Future workshops will be better targeted. We will design our SOA workshops to focus on one or the other of the above topics, not both combined.

3. We will look for newer and better ways to communicate news of forthcoming workshops to industry professionals. Some brainstorming will happen in the weeks ahead.

Fighting City Hall Just Got Harder - When Bad Ideas Become Industry Standards

Hardly had the proverbial ink dried on my white paper "Slicing the Gordian Knot of SOA Governance" when I found out that The Open Group (which I praised so recently for their TOGAF architecture framework) has issued a SOA Governance standard.

Their opening position is exactly what I think is wrong with the IT industry's concept of SOA Governance.

The architecture for those who think "scientific thinking" means "thinking about science"

And why do I think this is horribly wrong? Read my white paper to find out - it's free :-).

If you have problems downloading it from Slideshare, try mesfichiers.org or box.com.

Slicing the Gordian Knot of SOA Governance

Sometime last year, when I was working at WSO2, I was asked to write a white paper on SOA Governance. I made numerous attempts at this, and with each draft, I got lots of detailed technical feedback from some of WSO2's senior leadership team, but something wasn't working.

Ultimately, I realised that I had a fundamental philosophical argument with the whole notion of SOA Governance that I was being asked to write about. I felt that SOA was being overcomplicated and SOA Governance was a misnamed set of technology management tools. Now my problems with the white paper were not the fault of anyone at WSO2, because they were unfailingly patient with me. I finally realised that I had a problem with the entire SOA industry! Talk about fighting city hall...

To WSO2's immense credit, they let me go my own way instead of trying to force me to toe the industry line. They were gracious enough to tell me they would be willing to host any white paper I ultimately wrote, in their document library.

So I challenged myself at that point to "put up or shut up". If I thought the entire industry was wrong about SOA Governance, then I should at least put down in writing what I thought it should really be.

Well, it's been a whole year since then, folks, and the magnum opus is finally done!

I've called it "Slicing the Gordian Knot of SOA Governance - A Low-Ceremony Approach based on First Principles".

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The impatient can go and download it right away from Slideshare. It's just 116 pages long :-). In case Slideshare is too hard, get it from mesfichiers.org or from box.com.

Important note: This is not a slide deck. It is a document in portrait mode, which Slideshare doesn't display well. I'm using Slideshare purely as a document sharing mechanism, so you'll have to download the document and read it off-line. It's too painful to view the document on-line.

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I'm a bit exhausted right now, because the last week especially has been a mad rush trying to get this out the door. I have a workshop coming up on the 8th of December, and I want this out there so people will know what to expect when they sign up. Please write to courses@eignertech.com expressing your interest, and fairly soon!

Let me quote a few sections from the document that I think may be particularly interesting and counter-intuitive:

The four most important principles of SOA are dependencies, dependencies, dependencies and dependencies. We're not being entirely flippant in saying this, because there are four distinct “layers” in an organisation where dependencies need to be managed. These layers [...] are Business, Applications, Information (Data) and Technology.

“SOA Governance” does not mean the governance of SOA, any more than “scientific thinking” means “thinking about science”. [...] “SOA Governance” is about applying SOA thinking to governance, not about applying governance to SOA.

Governance is ensuring that the right things are done.
Management is ensuring that things are done right.

SOA Governance is determining what dependencies are legitimate at every layer of the organisation and identifying what existing dependencies fall outside this set.

SOA Management deals with how to remediate illegitimate dependencies at every layer of the organisation, how to formally document and communicate legitimate dependencies and how to prevent recurring violations.

Every expert unfailingly issues the standard disclaimer that SOA is not about technology, but the opposite message gets dog-whistled through the emphasis on products to manage web services, and ultimately prevails.

I hope that has whetted your appetite enough to make you download the white paper and read it.

I'm going to keep this draft version out there for a month or so. I'm open to all suggestions and feedback, and I hope to incorporate them into a final version that I will release before the end of December. I hope SOA practitioners and others will consider it a worthwhile Christmas gift :-).

Cheers and good night!