Service granularity and service reuse - why information semantics are key?

In the following blog which refers to the Amazon CEO's "letter to the share holders" one is truly amazed to read about how the Amazon team constructs a single product detail page from a combination of 200 to 300 services!!

Amazon architects may have truly found a way to identify the right level of service granularity to combine these into composite service offerings - without causing the information in the combined service to be distorted. This so called semantic dissonance has led many of us architects to create coarse grained services which preserve the quality of information but at the cost of reuse!

This is the the balancing act of how to define a service with the right grain of information encapsulated in it such that once it is combined with another service the combined service is still able to deliver meaningful information at the same grain of the originally combined services.  This is what we mean by semantics that govern how to combine two or more granular services to create a meaningful composite service which continues to encapsulate information that is valid and accurate.  It may be technically possible to create a composite or a single course grained service starting from two granular services (long as the canonical models/ payload have common elements) but the combination may overlook key business constraints, business rules, regulations and algorithms that render the final response invalid and inaccurate.  

A very simple example, combining product sales of a region with product marketing dollars to yield a service that delivers marketing efficacy may be a great new service concept.  However, if the product sales service does not provide information about the tenure of the product company by region or the presence of similar competitor products by region then the marketing efficacy service is not able to account for lift in the sales accurately.  The reason being marketing efficacy service cannot appropriately reflect the efficacy of the marketing dollar as being attributed to the "novelty" factor (where in the product is the first to enter the market in this region, or else if the product has a very attractive "entry price point" as it's debut to this new region).  Both of these artificially show that the marketing campaign strategy is far more successful than it might really be.  The price and novelty had more to do with the sales lift. 

 

The use of information by the business to make strategic decisions and the study of information flow across lines of business and the alignment of business information to strategic business activities is key to business architecture. By extension we find that it is in the realm of business architecture to govern service interactions and the creation of composite strategies to guard against semantic dissonance. 

Please share with me your thoughts.

surekha -

 

Blueprinting Information Architecture and BPM

Following my blog on Key Learning: Blueprinting Information Architecture is key to successful adoption of SOA one of the feedback was Don't we need to define the detailed business process to identify potential service candidates?

My response to that is No and explained it in this edition of the Strategic IT Update. Please click here for all the Strategic IT Update presentation and transcripts.

Reference: Customer Data Integration: BEA-IT Case Study (my presentation at CDI Summit in 2006)

Key Learnings: Blueprinting Information Architecture is key successful adoption of SOA

Following is the high-level approach for Blueprinting the SOA Framework for the enterprise.

Understand the business process and identify the areas for improvement
„Understand overall business objectives
„Understand specific business pain points
„Understand priorities

Develop the Enterprise Information Models to identify the Information services needed to support business processes

Develop the SOA Framework foundation to identify the infrastructure needed to support the business process needs.





Currently there are a lot of content available on the topic of best practices, key learning, reference architectures, ROI, etc. on the topics of Business Processes and Infrastructure. However there does not seem to be a lot of publications around Blueprinting the Information Architecture for SOA.

Basically there are three areas of focus for Blueprinting the Enterprise Information Architecture and are as follows:

• Reference data: Examples: salutation, job title, contact type, partner type, region, state/province, country, currency, language/locale, and industry
• Master data: Examples: customers, contacts, products and orders
• Analytic data: Examples: marketing data mart, forecasting, customer Life cycle value and customer satisfaction

Categorizing the key enterprise information needs into these three areas enables IT to have an very fruitful discussion with the business. However, the first task is to get business to fund and participate in this Blueprinting effort. Following is a very high level three step approach to Blueprinting the Information Architecture.

1. Scope and Planning (Establish: Budget and timeline, Team, Deliverable)
2. Information Architecture Assessment (Current state: high-level business process, data flow, data models - reference, master and analytics)
3. Information Architecture Blueprinting (Enterprise Information Model, Data Governance, Recommendations and Actionable Road map)

Why is this necessary?

Most business processes cross business and application silos. The current best practice is to migrate/move the data across these silos which results in redundant data, systems and places a lot of burden on business operations teams to clean it manually. In addition, multiple business silos tend to implement the same business process in different applications.

Adopting SOA enables enterprises to reduce the overall cost by enabling business to implement their business processes by consolidating/reusing a single infrastructure/application. This is possible only by exposing the appropriate information services to support the business processes.

This can be achieved only by truly understanding the Enterprise Information Model. Please click here for a three slide presentation on this.