Our story begins in the year of 2010 in a quiet hospital somewhere...
Suddenly a phone call disturbs the peaceful day of an R&D Manager and his colleague, the IT Manager...
"This is your CEO Calling", says the voice on the other line.
"I need you to change the process of prescribing drugs to a patient to include allergies check.... and you should allow doctors to watch patient record while working from outside of the hospital."
"And I need this done by tomorrow!" said the CEO
"Yes Sir" said the two managers as their CEO hung up the phone
Then, the camera zooms out and instead of seeing the managers working like crazy, you see them.... Playing Games!!!
What happened here? You probably ask...
Well, to answer that, we need to take you back in time to 2007 and tell you how we managed to implement SOA based on MS tools & methodologies and managed to bring the agility everyone is looking for.
As you've probably noticed, the story of Microsoft with SOA & ESB is delivered in a different way through a role-playing act-like humoristic manner.
The talk is intended for Business Decision Makers and is based not around what SOA is but rather around:
1) What you can gain with it?
2) How you can get there with MS from both the IT & the R&D eyes, which are very different.
First of all, feel free to download the PDF of the presentation from here.
The story goes through 4 major milestones that span a great portion of what MS has to offer in the SOA space:
1) The Research for SOA: Most organizations today are still in this phase, trying to look for case studies and how-to guidance for successful SOAs. Unfortunately, also Gartner says that only 7% of the organizations are failing to realize the value from SOA which is business agility. Therefore, we decided to tour the world for case studies that implemented SOA on MS Platform (Kaiser, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Dell, Haphenix and more) and also checked why SOA failed after talking to analysts. Finally we analyzed our hospital organization using the APIO (Application Platform Optimization Infrastructure) model from Microsoft. After this analysis, we were able to decide where to start and how to progress in stages.
2) Laying the Infrastructure services using the Microsoft ESB Toolkit. In this part, my colleague who played the IT Manager's role explained to me that ESB is more than a local American beer. He explained the core functionalities we can achieve out of deploying it in the hospital. He explained about automatic subscription, dynamic routing, registry and service governance using real scenarios from our work in the hospital. The ESB is actually like a run-time bus that services can attach themselves to during run-time and consumers can do the same. This is where the ESB Toolkit as a way to deliver an SOI (Service Oriented Infrastructure) is presented.
3) Delivering the business services that are a few levels above the infrastructure services. For example, "Discharge Patient" or "Check for Allergies" are business services while "Routing" or "Find Service" are infrastructure services. In this stage, I step into the picture telling my colleague that the infrastructure services are great as an ESB and I will consume them, but satisfying with this is like putting a lipstick on the pig's face :-) --> This can also be treated as a Bottom-Up approach that wraps what we have (which is easy to wrap) and not what we need. Therefore, I go through the Motion methodology for analyzing the business architecture from Top-Down.
To balance the top-down and bottom-up approach, Microsoft presents the middle-out approach which is an iterative cycle that goes through the business need with the highest priority and loops through an ECC cycle of Exposing the Services, Composing the business services and Consuming them from different types of clients. This part goes through some of the additional pieces in MS Story such as: WCF, Service Software Factory, Workflow Foundation, BizTalk Designer, Visual Studio Team Architect, CAB, Office Based Applications, SaaS and more. We present the first two cycles for the urgent business needs of "Treat Patient" and "Discharge Patient".
4) Realizing the Value - Do you still remember the 2010 phone call? After two iterations, we stop to show that the CEO's requests can be fully answered using the services we exposed up till now.
The presentation ends here, but the SOA doesn't. The secret is to continue to implement the Middle-Out Approach and the newly prioritized business needs and go through the ECC cycle with them.
SOA is like Love and Marriage: It starts with the glow of romance, but we need to invest in it in order to make it work...
Calls to Action:
1) Send your feedback about the message and the PDF
2) Ask for our help in starting with SOA in your organization
3) Send me an e-mail if you want us to present the story