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3rd March 2008

Lunch with Sandy Carter (IBM) and Pierre Haren (ILOG)

James Taylor Posted by James Taylor
Categories: Business Process Management, Business Rules, SOA

While attending DIALOG I had a chance to have lunch with Sandy Carter of IBM and Pierre Haren of ILOG. There was a lot of interesting discussion but two key themes caught my attention - business v IT drivers and reuse.

Sandy discussed how top-down SOA being driven by BPM and has an executive focus, although this only represents about 20% of SOA projects. The remainder are challenge-based implementations with a single focus area. Regardless, the business side represents more and more of the people IBM teaches about SOA with 40% line of business types in their SOA Executive Summits. These folks are driven by a desire to be a more “service-oriented” and dynamic business as well as by a desire to “fix this for good” in areas that have had many temporary solutions over the years. They see SOA as foundational in getting this permanent fix even while their business continues to change. Clearly business rules and policies are increasingly important in this approach and IBM sees that also. One of the key challenges IBM sees is how to measure agility and this has lead to their work on Key Agility Indicators. SOA is an evolution of previous attempts with standards now crossing many companies and a more business-centric language. Both Pierre and Sandy emphasized that business needs and business people are driving a surprising amount of the move to SOA.

Pierre took an interesting position on reuse. He felt that the main value of SOA today is in collaboration and understanding not in reuse. Sandy had some examples of customers getting a lot of reuse but generally supported Pierre’s point, that reuse is not essential to the SOA value proposition. After all, many previous architectures promised reuse and it never seems to get delivered. Reuse may well come, whether through reused services or reused rules between services, but the power of SOA to bridge the business and IT is key. Interestingly, of course, this is also the key value proposition for the use of business rules as a technology.

The group at lunch was lively and touched on governance, centers of excellence, demonstrable compliance through business rules and issues of process integrity across decomposed processes. Wish I had been able to write faster…

Anyway, that’s it from DIALOG.

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Articles in Live from DIALOG 08

  1. Blogging live from DIALOG 08
  2. Live from DIALOG - Best Practices in Rule Governance
  3. Live from DIALOG - Best Practices in Agile Business Rules Development
  4. Live from DIALOG - Pierre Haren Keynote
  5. Live from DIALOG - Sandy Carter on SOA and Web 2.0
  6. Live from DIALOG - Making Change Work to Your Advantage
  7. Live from DIALOG - Scott Klososky Keynote: Do You Have Velocity Leadership?
  8. Live from DIALOG - Agile Tax Management Using Rules and BPM
  9. Live from DIALOG - Innovation Black Holes - How do you avoid them?
  10. Live from DIALOG - Dynamic BPM—Where SOA, Rules, Processes and Events Come Together
  11. Live from DIALOG - Flexibility, Scalability and High Performance
  12. Live from DIALOG - Breakthrough in Claims Excellence Management
  13. Lunch with Sandy Carter (IBM) and Pierre Haren (ILOG)
  14. Live from IMPACT - Multi-channel retailing on SOA

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This entry was posted by James Taylor on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 6:33 pm and is filed under Business Process Management, Business Rules, SOA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There are currently 4 responses to “Lunch with Sandy Carter (IBM) and Pierre Haren (ILOG)”

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  1. 1 On March 4th, 2008, Is SOA still of value if nothing gets reused? How about if everything gets reused? | Service-Oriented Architecture | ZDNet.com said:

    [...] Taylor, who has been blogging prolifically from Dialog 08, reports that he had a chance to break bread with IBM’s Sandy Carter and ILOG’s Pierre Haren, [...]

  2. 2 On March 5th, 2008, Externalization of rules and SOA is important - for now « Commercial Intelligence said:

    [...] GRC, knowledge management, SOA — paul@haleyAI.com @ 11:32 am James Taylor’s notes on his lunch with Sandy Carter of IBM and the CEO of Ilog prompted me to write this.  The [...]

  3. 3 On March 5th, 2008, Paul Haley said:

    Seems to me that the externalization is the key part of both rules and SOA with respect to decisions, James.

    The fact that service-oriented professionals find the term SOA titilating should not constitute a technical strategy, however (even if does constitute a marketing strategey!)

    It is amazing that people still take about reuse even though that promise has been broken or wilted so many times, from object-oriented to service-oriented. The focus should be on productivity until it gets to the knowledge level. It seems tautological that knowledge would not be reusable.

    Interesting that business control over agility is not more front and center. Words like rules and architecture don’t belong in such conversations (my view).

  4. 4 On March 5th, 2008, Neil Raden said:

    75% of a Fortune 500 company’s IT budget is spent on maintenance (Forrester). It stands to reason that the real lift from reuse is the positive impact it could have on maintenance. We spend a lot time thinking about design and development, but that really isn’t the pain point for most companies. So how would SOA provide the kind of reuse that would have a real impact? I only see two options. In the first, we build services that are so fine-grained and so numerous that applications can be composed in an infinite number of ways. For this to work, there has to be metamodel that describes the features of these services in excruciating detail and (said repository) has to be endowed with enough intelligence to reason on its own about best choices, redundancy, dependencies, etc. I don’t see anything like that available in the near future.

    The other option is a few giant services that do everything, but are so general in nature that configuring them for an application is a massive undertaking. SAP R/3 comes to mind, though the reuse is at a higher level (the software company’s).

    Clearly, something in between is the answer, but we have a way to go before we have the kind of active, inductive, representational framework to arbitrate an architecture like this.

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