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February 20, 2007

Building a business as an SOA

I was at a trade show about SOA on Wall Street the other day. There were a large number of vendors, belonging to various parts of the SOA 'ecosystem', exhibiting. The high degree of differentiation I saw in their offerings (ESBs, SOA testing, SOA acceleration, SOA/RIA etc.) convinced me that SOA concepts have finally become thoroughly mainstream.

I remember hearing what later became the SOA mantra for the first time perhaps 5 years ago, around when XML Web services on Microsoft .NET came out. I don't particularly care to go into the benefits of SOA in great detail in this post. The one sentence summary though is that a service-oriented architecture, built from a bag of loosely-coupled, interoperating services that can be composed together leads to higher flexibility and agility (both good things) in a business because the knowledge needed to answer business questions is all in services that can talk to each other instead of being locked up in siloed business units that don't. I started to wonder though--how would it be if, instead of being merely a technical implementation consideration in a business, an SOA lay at the core of the business itself?

I am a strong believer in the software engineering maxim that software written by any company carries the footprint of the organizational structure of the company. A recurring theme I saw in the experience of the many banks represented at the show was the difficulty of grafting an SOA onto an already functioning business. Apparently, finding the right SOA vendor is relatively easy. But transforming internal business processes so that business logic is separated out into independent service units is much harder. If the many high-stakes technology end users on Wall St are serious about reaping the benefits of SOA, they should construct their businesses as an SOA and let that leave its organizational imprint on their technology stacks. How might they go about doing this?

1. Everyone in a managerial role, all the way down to the lowest rung, defines say five business questions that they and their reports can answer. They might be long questions, possibly involving scenarios or set-ups, but they must NOT be open-ended questions. Examples could be, "How many accounts does Fidelity Investments hold with us?", or "What will the budget be for the upcoming financial year?"
2. Enter these questions into one company wide, searchable full-text database. This database will make it really easy to find which manager is responsible for a given business question. Knowledge will no longer be locked up in silos, because instead of reimplementing some business functionality in your own group's software, you can reuse such knowledge from someone else.
3. Work with technologists to develop services that answer these business questions.
4. ???
5. Profit

Essentially, this database would be the plain-English, business equivalent of a service registry. Software requirements should always flow from the business questions expressed in this central database, which should be the authoritative source. The ??? in step 4 above, aside from being a throwback to the old Slashdot chestnut, is actually intended seriously. There are a number of unknowns to be taken into account: what if I need a valuation algorithm, but I don't like the depreciation and cash flow methods that Bob from accounting uses? What if Jane from payroll doesn't give me answers in the way I like? To a lot of these questions, I don't necessarily know the answer. I do believe though that this scheme could work as more than just a thought experiment. Any thoughts from my readers?

Posted by Vishy at 08:21 PM | Comments (1)

February 18, 2007

What do you call Smirnoff Ice, Skyy Blue and Mike's Hard Lemonade?

Drinks like Smirnoff Ice, Skyy Blue, Mike's Hard Lemonade and Bacardi Silver are called alcopops because they are alcoholic but really taste just like soda/pop. I really don't like the name alcopop though—it just doesn't roll off the tongue. In the vein of the classic bro/manziere debate, I propose we call such a drink a boe. Let me explain.

Most of these drinks describe themselves as 'Flavored Beer', even though they taste nothing like beer. Also, they are known simply as 'girly drinks' or 'chick beer' in common parlance. So, why not call a bottle of say, Smirnoff Ice a boe, as in

Boe, a beer, a female beer
Gray, a splash of Smirnoff Ice

Sound of Music fans: please feel free to contribute the rest of the lyrics in the comments.

Posted by Vishy at 11:23 AM | Comments (0)

February 15, 2007

Vishy's Indian English Dictionary: banian

banian./buni·YAHN/. An article of clothing worn underneath a man's shirt on just the top half of his body. Known as a wifebeater (or spousal abuser, if you prefer) in the United States. Origin unclear, but you'll find tons of Indian billboards that proudly advertise men's underwear with this word on them. I've always been really curious that I never saw this word even once outside India. Not to be confused with banYan, which is the kind of tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment.

Posted by Vishy at 12:25 AM | Comments (1)

February 06, 2007

Many Startings (aka State of The Blog #2)

One of the concluding chapters in the Lord of the Rings trilogy is called "Many Partings". In it, the great war with Sauron and his evil posse has just concluded and the characters on the good side are all bidding farewell to each other, with exhausted reserves but renewed alliances. In keeping with this blog's Lord of the Rings connection--limited pretty much to just the domain name--this post is titled "Many Startings" because it marks a few new beginnings:

• A new career. My three years as a software developer in the finance industry were pretty good. I got to tinker with some fun technology, sometimes even on a fairly deep level. I got to be part of influential teams in both large and small companies. Day after day though, I would come home and find that although it paid the bills (and college loan payments and all that), it didn't really push my buttons. So, over the past year, I've been trying to find out what does. Want to guess before I tell you? Let me give you a hint -- you're reading it! I looked deep within myself and found that one of the best parts of my day was when I would blog after I got home from work. Somehow, after a year of blogging, writing English started to feel much more natural than writing C#. A gig where I could write a lot about areas I know, namely technology, would really hit the sweet spot. And so, off I went looking.
  I just started as an industry analyst at The 451 Group, an independent analyst firm that researches and analyzes trends and competition in the tech industry for a senior technology executive audience. The bulk of our clients are venture capitalists, early adopters of IT, financial analysts and the executive management of technology vendors. My official title for now is "Analyst, Software Development and Tools". I'll draw on my personal software development experience with a wide variety of platforms to understand the strategic issues in software development today and comment on them. As time goes on, I may expand my coverage areas depending on my interest and appetite.
  Although The 451 Group is technically in the same business as Gartner, IDC and Forrester, it is different in two very important ways that have me really excited. First, they are independent. They don't accept payment for writing favorable or unfavorable reports about companies. They don't broker technology deals or provide technology recommendations. This mode of functioning provides the highest amount of detachment and objectivity in the increasingly high-stakes business of technology. Second, they grok open source. They have had a research focus specifically on open source and how it is being adopted in enterprise and commercial settings. Open source is and will continue to be huge and I am really excited about building up personal expertise in how it is used in enterprises. Although I will now be writing English rather than code for most of my day, I'll remain a developer-type at heart. I'll probably tinker with personal code projects in my free time that you may hear about on this blog. Writing code for yourself is always fun!
• "Ironically", a new blog. Lately, I've started to notice that a lot of writers use the word ironically when it is really not called for. So, taking inspiration from a parallel effort built around the word literally, I've started 'Ironically, a weblog' to track abuses of the word ironically. It's not brand spanking new -- I started it just after the U.S. midterm elections in November. It will be pretty light on content; its entries will only feature quotes containing the word ironically and then knock the author for using it incorrectly. It's more an eclectic gallery for people who occasionally indulge in sanctimonious pedantry, like myself, rather than a full-featured personal journal. Stop by Ironically sometime, if you feel like it.
• Second year summary and possible changes in focus. This blog is now over two years old. 2006 was a great year for me, for I was named Person Of The Year by Time magazine, along with you. I'll take this opportunity to thank all my readers and commenters (even the viagra, phentermine and vioxx ones!) for stopping by. In the last year, the number of visitors to my blog has grown tenfold. The 'value' of my blog went up fivefold. Vishy's media empire? Far from it, but I wouldn't exactly complain if it grows at this rate every year. My pieces got reddited and stumbled-upon, in addition to being featured in a few online publications and blogs. I got visitors from 144 countries; some of them were even zealous Mac users! According to certain demographic prediction tools, almost two thirds of my visitors are male.
  Because The 451 Group's research is available via subscription, the reports I write obviously won't be freely accessible from this blog. For the same reason, I will also not write posts here about anything I cover in a professional capacity. While I will still write about general-interest technology topics, India and Indian English, my posts will now also feature one of my prime obsessions, food. I don't think of myself as a classic foodie because they just go where their Zagat Guide tells them to go. I prefer to explore restaurants and home cooking ideas on my own journeys and report on my findings.

So far, I've used this blog as basically just an outlet to write about my thoughts and random interesting things I see. It has been much more well received in terms of traffic and readership than I had expected it to be. To give back, I plan to acquire more of the conventional trappings of a blogger, add a blogroll, a set of del.icio.us links and create some outbound traffic. These changes will happen in the coming weeks. So, keep visiting! I am really excited about all these new startings and I hope you will be too.

Posted by Vishy at 12:38 AM | Comments (2)

February 05, 2007

Is GooTunes in the works?

I was just trawling through Google's robots.txt and I found "/music" on the list of blocked-off URLs. I also found this post by Danny Sullivan from over a year ago about Google Music Search, which is linked to "/musicsearch". Neither of the two URLs led to anything useful when I checked, but they do lead to different error pages. If we take this to mean that they are not synonyms, then "/music" points to something other than a music search product. What might it be then? A Google Music Store, which we shall call GooTunes.

There is a lot of money in the rich media content business, one that Google is just flexing its muscles at with YouTube. If Google applies its devil-may-care attitude to selling music, we might actually see variable pricing implemented by a major company for the first time--not because the record labels want it but because consumers want it. Google might even take the user's side and try to offer entirely DRM-free music on GooTunes, but watch out Google--Amazon's forthcoming music store is rumored to offer DRM-free, variably priced music. No matter what sort of goodies Google puts into GooTunes, we can be sure it will make at least half the music industry (and Apple!) sit up and take notice.

One thing that worries me about this is that social applications have never been Google's strong suit. Online music stores have generated a lot of buzz not just because the iPod has been successful, but also because they bring together people with similar musical tastes. When you look at Pandora, last.fm and similar sites, it's easy to see that there is a strong social component inherent in the leading edge of innovation in digital music downloads. The question is, can Google execute on it?

Posted by Vishy at 12:22 AM | Comments (0)

February 04, 2007

Rats on New York City subways

Inspired by a recent conversation I had with Karolina:

Posted by Vishy at 12:52 PM | Comments (0)