Organization Skills assessment and Reference Architecture

The other day I was participating in the engineering skills assessment discussion and it dawned on me that mapping the skills to a reference architecture makes is much easier and simpler discussion to have. The reference architecture enabled us to first list the categories and drill into each of them to define the skills as well as leveling required for Architects, Developers, QA and Managers positions.

Key Learning's:

• Having a reference architecture also helps in organization (engineering) skills assessment
• The Skills Assessment / Mapping is independent of Governance and Organization. However, Governance drive where these resources belong
  

Overhauled the SOA Blueprint site

The previous SOA Blueprint site was not very well organized and nor was it easy to maintain. As I was browsing through the Yahoo! Web Hosting Console I came across the "Site Solution" tool which makes it easier to manage and publish the content. Hope you like the new layout and please do feel free to send me your feedback, comments and/or any questions related to SOA.

Following are the categories of content currently posted on the site.

• SOA Practitioners Guide
• SOA Case Studies - reference to case studies published by forums, analysts and vendors
• SOA Organization and Governance
• Enterprise Architecture Frameworks - links to the most common EA frameworks
• Enterprise Architecture Resources - Resource page with information relevant to the Enterprise Architecture teams
• SOA Reference Architecture - Reference to a list of various published SOA Reference Architectures
• SOA Maturity Models - There are multiple maturity model and this page attempts to list all the major ones along with some comments, if possible.

Please feel free to also send relevant links or documents that would be useful for adopting SOA.

SOA Practitioners Guide

A few early adopters of SOA met last year back (August 2005) and agreed to establish an SOA community. This community was prelaunced at the Global Integration Summit (GIS) with the following proposed objectives.

• Get agreement on terminology for discussing SOA.
• Influence and deliver requirements to Standards Organizations and Vendors
• Provide education and rich understanding:
• Articulate & Promote Business Value Capture
• Disseminate Success Stories, Best/Worst Practices
• Offer templates, tool and methodology to ensure investment success

The same early adopters did publish the SOA Reference Architecture at the same event and continued working on documenting SOA best practice. As the SOA communitly was has not yet been formally launced early SOA adopters agreed to publish these best practices as SOA Practitioners Guides and are also available at my structured blog.

SOA Practitioners Guide (Abstract):

SOA is relatively new, so companies seeking to implement it cannot tap into a wealth of practical expertise. Without a common language and industry vocabulary based on shared experience, SOA may end up adding more custom logic and increased complexity to IT infrastructure, instead of delivering on its promise of intra and inter-enterprise services reuse and process interoperability. To help develop a shared language and collective body of SOA, a group of SOA practitioners created this SOA Practitioners Guide series of documents. In it, these SOA experts describe and document best practices and key learnings relating to SOA, to help other companies address the challenges of SOA. The SOA Practitioners Guide is envisioned as a multi-part colelction of publications that can act as a standard reference encyclopedia for all SOA stageholders.

The guide is available in three parts:

SOA Practitioners Guide Part 1: Why Services-Oriented Architecture? - This guide provides a high-level summary of SOA.

SOA Practitioners Guide Part 2: SOA Reference Architecture - This guide covers the SOA Reference Architecture, which provides a worked design of an enterprise-wide SOA implementation with detailed architecture diagrams, component descriptions, detailed requirements, design patterns, opinions about standards, patterns on regulation compliance, standards templates and potential code assets from members.

SOA Practitioners Guide Part 3: Introduction to Services Lifecycle — This guide introduces the Services Lifecycle and provides a detailed process for services management though the service lifecycle, from inception through to retirement or repurposing of the services. It also contains an appendix that includes organization and governance best practices, templates, comments on key SOA standards, and recommended links for more information.

Contributing SOA Practitioners:

• Surekha Durvasula, Enterprise Architect, Kohls
• Martin Guttmann, Principal Architect, Customer Solutions Group, Intel Corp
• Ashok Kumar, Manager, SOA Archtiecture, Avis Budget
• Jeffery Lamb, Enterprise Architect, Wells Fargo
• Tom Mitchell, Lead Technical Architect, Wells Fargo Private Client Services
• Burc Oral, Inidividual Contributor
• Yogish Pai, Chief Architect AquaLogic Composer, BEA Systems, Inc.
• Tom Sedlack, Enterprise Architecture and Engineering, SunTrust Banks, Inc.
• Dr. Harsh Sharma, Senior Information Architect, MetLife
• Sankar Ram-Sundaresan, Chief Architect e-Business, HP-IT