"A Systems Engineer’s View of SOA"

Speaker: Robert Cloutier

Track: From Architecture to Design

An SOA is not just a software implementation; it requires skills that are closely associated with the Systems Engineering discipline. While most focus on the implementation of services across large, uncertain environments, much must be considered in terms of system latency, service granularity, interface definitions, and service availability. This presentation will address architecture patterns that extend the use of SOA into engineering. The goal is to get above the vendor hype of tools and products for implementing service-oriented software, and to address some of the broader issues that may influence the success or failure of a given SOA implementation.

"Surviving the Trough of Disillusionment"

Speaker: David Mihelcic

Track: From Architecture to Design

This description will be added soon.

"Primitives and Design Patterns for Top-Down SOA Implementations"

Speaker: Michael zur Muehlen

Track: From Design to Execution

While service-oriented architecture frameworks (such as DoDAF) help guide the development of consistent architecture artifacts, significant roadblocks still exist for effective architecture development, adoption, integration, and federation. Many of these roadblocks result from the lack of uniform representation for the same semantic content. IT architects use different methodologies to develop models; these models are represented using different modeling languages and created using different modeling tools. Even within a single methodology there may exist a variety of different modeling styles, techniques, and practices for similar content.

There is a need for standard formats for diagrams, standard data formats for the exchange of these diagrams, and standard formats for data that moves within and between the architectures that diagrams represent. A proposed solution is to establish a set of architectural primitives and corresponding design patterns that provide a core set of “building block” modeling elements founded in the well-defined semantics of the DoDAF Meta Model (DM2). These building blocks are accompanied by a recommended set of modeling techniques aimed at covering the different views on enterprise architecture.

We demonstrate the applications of these patterns using a DoD mission thread that is decomposed in a top-down fashion to the level where individual service and message properties can be selected. The resulting models provide a structured approach toward the top-down identification of required services in support of SOA.

"Common Vocabulary Implementation for SOA"

Speaker: Wil Mancuso

Track: From Design to Execution

This description will be added soon.

"Model Preserving Strategy for BPM & SOA"

Speaker: Nathaniel Palmer

Track: From Design to Execution

The multiple model approach comes from a long tradition of programming and system development. As the BPM marketplace was forming, software engineering experts became aware of and involved in setting the direction for the software tools. Automating the process to manage work that people do requires creating a model of that process. This view fits the traditional lens of software engineering: a high level model is designed by a business process is subsequently translated to some executable program. The process analyst: someone who knows the goals, needs, and constraints of the business office and can design a process that is compatible with these business constraints.

The process analyst cannot be expected to be a programmer as well, at least not in the traditional sense. So the model is then given to a programmer or systems integrator, who extends the model provided by the process analyst to add the integration capability. This is done by translating the “human centric” model to a “system centric” model, either by adding in extra nodes which handle integration activities, or by transforming the diagram into a completely new diagram that represent the system level interactions that have to go on in order to cause the business level interactions to take place.

Yet translating from one model to another model forces a “waterfall” deployment model, mandating that each step must be as complete as possible before translation. This approach runs counter to the agility-related benefits of BPM and SOA, making it much harder to employ incremental and iterative development.

A model preserving strategy allows business managers, technologists, and workers to collaborate in creating, maintaining and using a single, graphical representation of the process model for all aspects of the BPM lifecycle. This approach enables the greatest possible alignment between what intended by the business and what is enacted in the system.

This presentation will illustrate how a model preserving strategy provides the truest path to the realization of agile architectures: The model is drawn by and for business people. They are NOT transformed into a different model for development. They are NOT converted to a different model for execution.

"The Convergence of BPM and SOA"

Speaker: Keith Swenson

Track: From Design to Execution

The advent of new interoperability standards are making it possible to design very large distributed workflows. Because there is no single point of failure, no centralized control, this approach is proving to be highly reliable, especially in situations with sporadic connectivity. This talk will cover the standards that are necessary to make this a reality.

First is BPMN and XPDL which together enable many people to work in a "Process Design Ecosystem". When executing the workflow, Workcast Protocol allows people to aggregate workitem from any number of separate servers. Wf-XML Runtime Interpretability Protocol allow processes to span many process servers with intermittent connectivity. Finally BPAF is a standard that allows for aggregating process analytics for tracking and for evaluating performance of processes. This talk will present a vision of how proper adoption of these standards could change the shape of process support technology as we know it today.

"SOA in Legacy Modernization"

Speaker: Satadru Roy

Track: From Design to Execution

SOA-enablement of legacy systems can bring about significant benefits but also can introduce its share of unique challenges. The mere wrapping of legacy assets with Web service facades does very little to realize the promised gains of service-oriented computing as legacy interfaces are often characterized by poor separation of business and technical data, channel specific dependencies, tie-ins to green screen user interfaces as well as duplication of business logic for online and batch processing.

As a result of maturing SOA methodologies, several large-scale legacy transformation initiatives have successfully employed a mix of top-down and bottom-up analysis and design to map their existing assets to target business processes and services. This talk presents design techniques and design patterns that demonstrate how to help build service interfaces that are truly reusable across multiple channels, offer clean separation of technical data from business data and allow component and service reuse across online and batch processing environments. The presentation concludes with a real-world case study of how iterative analysis and incremental design refactorings allowed a large multinational organization to achieve a high degree of service reuse across different divisions and even legal entities.

"Real World Experiences in Implementing SOA"

Speaker: Kerrie Holley and Paul Giangarra

Track: From Design to Execution

This description will be added soon.

"Open Source SOA"

Speaker: Mark Little

Track: Emerging SOA Technology

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) are the buzzwords of choice these days, but where do they fit in with IT development (and budgets)? What is their relationship to Web Services and the rapidly evolving WS-* architecture? And how does open source play in this space? In this presentation, we'll look at SOA and ESB concepts and relate them to what is happening with the JBoss SOA Platform that has rapidly become an important SOA infrastructure in the open source market. We’ll also look at how the open source community has helped drive the architecture and adoption of the SOA, where this roadmap is leading us to, and how you can get involved.

"Scalable SOA in Your Own Open Source Cloud"

Speaker: Sanjiva Weerawarana

Track: Emerging SOA Technolog

Cloud computing is today’s rage and tomorrow's threat - proprietary clouds have the potential to become a worse lock-in platform than the proprietary world of yesterday. In this talk we examine how you can put together a pure open source cloud for SOA and enjoy the benefits of service-oriented cloud computing without the risks.

Cloud computing is primarily about three things: on-demand scaling for peak load management, multi-tenant sharing, and parallel execution. On-demand scaling refers to the ability of the cloud to allow an application to consume more resources as the demand on the application increases and for this to happen without over participation from the developer. Multi-tenancy relates to how a single application can be shared and used securely (and independently) by different consumers. Finally, parallel execution enables an application to request additional hardware and to execute in the entire set of nodes as a parallel computer. The most challenging part of the puzzle is providing a single programming model for application developers.

Proprietary clouds such as Amazon EC2, Google AppEngine and Microsoft Azure do offer many of these capabilities. However, signing up to a proprietary cloud is like checking into the proverbial Hotel California: “You can check out but you can never leave!” During this presentation we will look at how a collection of open source components can be combined to form an open source cloud that addresses all aspects of cloud computing but that also leverages open standards to establish a model whereby applications running on open source clouds can fully interoperate with other cloud platforms as well.

"Software as a Service (SaaS) and SOA"

Speaker: Marc Gille

Track: Emerging SOA Technolog

SOA relies on the use of independent business orchestrated to automate business process flows. In real world scenarios these services – even independent ones – are provided as part of a larger applications, application modules, or entire frameworks. Consuming these services for a concrete tenant often requires installation of the application, which can significantly influence the duration of the lifecycle required to provide a fully orchestrated process flow (due to cycles involving installation, evaluation, testing, selection of the required service building blocks). Availability of services via Software as a Service (SaaS) procurement and provisioning models reduces this duration dramatically and hence supports a much faster evolutionary process of selecting and replacing services and creating complex process flows.

The presentation describes how the SaaS value-chain and SOA project lifecycle processes can be linked and how semantics and quality of complex software systems are influenced by this linkage.

"Service-Oriented Architecture and Cloud Computing Concepts"

Speaker: Lamont Harrington

Track: State of the Art SOA Technology

SOA has been seen as the “silver bullet” to a number of integration challenges we’ve faced as an industry. From providing a flexible access mechanism to previously isolated information systems to bridging the gap between multiple “siloed” Lines of Business (LOB) systems, SOA-based solutions have provided a tremendous amount of business value. However, with today’s economic climate, and with many organizations demanding more value from their investments, new business challenges have arisen that have forced organizations to look for solutions to further augment and extend their existing SOA investments.

Cloud Computing is a relatively new wrinkle in today’s IT nomenclature that raises a considerable number of questions as to how best to embrace it and what solutions serve as ideal candidates for this new paradigm. Cloud Computing offers compelling solution alternatives that can further extend the reach, value, and investments in SOA and unlock the potential for SOA in new and exciting ways to address core challenges that traditional SOA solutions have failed to meet.

This session will cover how Microsoft has taken the paradigms of SOA and Cloud Computing to formulate a strategy that combines the power and reliability of software with the flexibility and reach of services. This strategy embraces the core tenants of service orientation while at the same time brings to bear new advances in computing that address core IT infrastructure challenges around the delivery of services at large scale as well as addressing concerns around security, availability, and reliability. In addition, the need to be able to address new business scenarios around occasional connectivity and extending reach to multiple devices (e.g. PC, Phone, PDA) has increased in its importance.

This session will also discuss how this strategy further supports the principles of existing frameworks and architecture methodologies such as the Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) as it relates to the integration of disparate architectures across organizational, joint, and multinational boundaries.

Overall, we will articulate a vision around service orientation and the new paradigm of Cloud Computing and define its strategy for a new generation of computing that further improves the value proposition of SOA and the existing IT investments made by your organizations around SOA.

"SOA and Event-Driven Architecture"

Speaker: Clemens Utschig-Utschig

Track: State of the Art SOA Technology

There are many real-life problems where a combination of SOA and event-driven architecture (EDA) can provide an ideal basis for the overall solution architecture. For example, managing passenger logistics in an airport or complex trouble-ticket handling at a large Telco or creating fraud alerts in financial trading company. SOA principles enable loosely coupled integration or orchestration of solution components via service endpoints, while EDA facilitates essentially asynchronous loosely-coupled through decoupled interactions of solution components. Typically, SOA best operates in request-reply mode of message-based interactions where the requestor of an action is aware of who supplies the response. In a general EDA implementation, event-based interactions are done in a publish-subscribe mode and the originator of an event (the publisher) need not know who all receive and consume (the subscriber) that event.

It is natural to expect special considerations when SOA and EDA paradigms are combined in a solution. Interesting questions related to such a combined strategy range from recognition of situations where such a strategy is most useful to various architectural details. Some argue that SOA includes EDA while some claim that EDA extends SOA. In this session will address the following questions: What are the essential architectural differences between the two paradigms? Are the events the same as messages? What about the communication architectures and protocols? What are some of the key performance and security considerations of these paradigms? A clear understanding of these issues will not only help you design better solutions but also avoid common pitfalls.

"Recovery.gov Architecture"

Speaker: Kshemendra Paul

Track: State of the Art SOA Technology

This description will be added soon.

"DoD Acquisition Visibility (AV) SOA Policies, Governance and Implementation"

Speaker: Gary R. Bliss

Track: Policies & Processes

On 5 March 2009, Under Secretary for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics signed a memo entitled “Full Implementation of Acquisition Visibility (AV) Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) within DoD Acquisition Community.” The memo commits the AV SOA team to a comprehensive SOA governed data infrastructure and tools to be available by September 2009 in order to support next fall’s FY11 program/budget review. This effort represents the first attempt by the acquisition community to both systematical govern the definitions and authoritative sources of its key data elements, as well as provide those data to each of the many tools that the community uses.

In preparation for the standing up of the formal authority which the memo grants, the AV SOA team prepared extensive governance tools, policies and procedures, as well as established a SOA IT infrastructure. That IT system has been operating on a pilot basis for over three months providing key data and tools on DoD’s 37 largest programs to the acquisition community.

This brief will summarize the key operational, institutional and policy features of the AV SOA implementation and offer lessons learned on what appears to work and what has failed in the effort to date. Rapidly delivering value to customers has been a central tenet of the AV SOA project since its inception, and reconciling that goal with the necessary impediments to institutional implementation constitutes a useful case study of SOA in a heterogeneous, multi-Service environment.

"Enterprise Resource Planning in SOA-based IT Landscapes"

Speaker: Raj Duvuru

Track: Policies & Processes

This description will be added soon.

"SOA: A True Transformation Story"

Speaker: Kevin Moore

Track: Policies & Processes

Since WWI, military entrance processes have gone relatively unchanged and have been paper-based, linear, and time intensive. Needless to say, it's time for change! Specifically, a change toward SOA... Restated: Change that virtualizes military accessions, reduces costs, reduces attrition, reduces time, and enhances data exchange across DoD.

This session addresses the actual transformational journey of the U.S. Military Entrance Processing Command (USMEPCOM) as it dramatically reengineers its Enterprise Architecture and the business of military accessions while using SOA as a key enabler.

Highlights of this presentation are:
- USMEPCOM's Rationale, Strategy/Approach, and Implementation of a SOA
- Challenges, Impacts, and Lessons Learned
- Driving Transformation and Change Management

"Case Study: Maritime Domain Awareness Data Sharing Community of Interest (MDA DS COI)"

Speaker: Chris Raney and Trey Rhiddlehoover

Track: Government Missions

In March 2006 the Maritime Domain Awareness Data Sharing Community of Interest (MDA DS COI), which involved joint participation from Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of Transportation, was formed to resolve issues related to the sharing of information relevant to MDA. The MDA DS COI accomplished this by identifying an initial information sharing problem for a Spiral 1 pilot and creating a community-defined vocabulary and data model to support information exchanges among producers and consumers during the pilot. The MDA DS COI leveraged the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Net-Centric Enterprise Services (NCES) on NIPRNET as a common Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) framework for data producers to make data visible, accessible, and understandable to authorized consumers. The MDA DS COI was awarded the 2007 Federal CIO Leadership award for the first instance within the federal government that demonstrated the capability to net-centrically share data across multiple federal agencies. MDA DS COI Spiral 3 is focused on exposing new data sources and integrating new producers and consumers. The MDA DS COI will transition to the National MDA Architecture Management Hub to expand the net-centric data sharing and services support to the Global Maritime Community of Interest.

"Case Study: A DoD SOA Pilot"

Speaker: Howard Cohen

Track: Government Missions

There are many significant SOA efforts within the DoD, but some are closer to “stove-pipes” of excellence rather than cross-cutting enablers of information exchange and operations. One of the most difficult parts of creating these cross-cutting service-oriented solutions is understanding the numerous policies, directives and standards that must be understood.

One of the recent DoD system engineering efforts that has succeeded in working across all Defense Services (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, etc) is the DoD Architecture Framework (DoDAF). DoDAF serves as an overarching and comprehensive framework that enables DoD managers at all levels to make key decision more effectively through information sharing across DoD components and program boundaries.

The US Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) J89, Systems Engineering and Integrated Architectures Division is currently involved in a pilot effort to federate DoDAF architecture data across domains to create, update and use data from multiple sources in order to compose and present federated architecture views that are DoDAF/SOA compliant.

This project is spearheaded and led by the USJFCOM Chief Enterprise Architect, Kim Frisby. J89 formed a working group, involving USJFCOM, US Army and US Marines, to create use cases for data federation in the DoD architecture community using SOA service concepts. This challenging project requires constant synchronization, exceptional leadership, community acceptance, and development within common standards.

In this presentation we will explore how this team is attempting to leverage the resources that are in the DoD to get the job done and satisfy all of the requirements (effective and implied) to create a complex system with endpoints that are reachable. The insights revealed by the J89 working group will help further SOA adoption within the DoD.

"Organizational and Management Issues Vital to SOA and BPM Success"

Speaker: Paul Brown

Track: Skills & Knowledge

Succeeding with SOA requires significant levels of inter-organizational cooperation and coordination – levels typically beyond those already in existence within the enterprise. Conceptualizing a service provided by one group and suitable for use by other groups requires the collaboration of all of the involved groups. For business services, this collaboration requires the participation of the business side of the house as well as the IT groups.

This talk explores the challenges of directing and coordinating the work of multiple organizational units. Central to this coordination are the business process and systems architects, whose responsibility it is to define the overall structure and organization of both business processes and the systems that bring them to life. Their work not only defines the roles of the systems, but also defines the roles and responsibilities of the organizations involved. The role of the project manager is critical in negotiating the required cooperation and resource commitments.

Ensuring that proposed services will fit future needs requires the perspective of the enterprise architecture group. As individual projects identify potential services, the enterprise architecture group must validate the service concept and specify it broadly enough to support intended future usages. The timeliness of this engagement is critical to the reusability of the service, as projects have deadlines to meet. In the absence of timely engagement, projects are likely to implement services based on a very narrow perspective, which will have an adverse impact on service reuse.

Another issue to be dealt with is the possible misalignment of individual group priorities with respect to project goals. Such misalignments must be corrected in order to obtain the required group cooperation. Correcting these misalignments requires action on the part of the business and IT executives with line authority over the groups involved. The talk concludes with some suggestions for organizing multiple projects and the enterprise architecture group with respect to enterprise management.

"SOAU: A Case Study in Workforce SOA Education "

Speaker: Derik Pack

Track: Skills & Knowledge

As SPAWAR began exploring SOA, it became obvious that a common framework of understanding to address implementation issues was not present in the organization; neither did it exist in our interactions with sponsors, contractors and other government agencies. Without that framework, our workforce could not adequately communicate or learn the technical and management challenges associated with SOA adoption. This led to the recognition of certain personnel and organizational challenges that had to be addressed in order to adopt SOA.

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From a personnel perspective, understanding the principles and the "why" of Service-Orientation are even more important than the "what". Engineers in our organization, many of whom did not yet grasp the service-oriented paradigm from a technical/web-service perspective, also needed to be educated on Service-Orientation as a philosophy, as an architecture design pattern.

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From an organization perspective, a lot of the key internal and external relationships between the Government, Government/Commercial Industries and the Academic communities were/are fragmented, point-to-point relationships, with little information sharing between them. As an example, our organization did not have a comprehensive list of learning resources for SOA from outside sources; much less methods to review and update that list or communicate it to others.

Challenges like those above require an educated workforce and strong communication channels with multiple knowledgeable sources. Unless these challenges are addressed through a proactive element of an organization devoted to Education and Workforce Development using a repeatable process, the next set of disruptive technologies will have the same negative impact.

This talk provides a case study on SPAWAR's ongoing effort to address the personnel and organizational relationship challenges in SOA for our workforce. It is our belief that the presented concepts and processes for personnel and relationship development can be leveraged to create a common framework of understanding for SOA or any other disruptive concept or technology within an organization

"Mission Thread Management across Federated SOA Systems"

Speaker: Paul Butterworth

Track: Skills & Knowledge

SOA has ushered in flexible systems that greatly enhance warfighter capabilities and related support functions. For Defense initiatives, the ultimate incarnation of SOA is the Mission Thread, a collection of application components and processes specifically designed to automate a particular set of critical, mission-focused tasks. Mission Threads are large, complex collections of heterogeneous technologies spanning a variety of communications methods. However, such complexity comes at a price. Most Mission Threads today are brittle – they often break without warning, leaving the warfighter or other user with no response to his critical request. Under such conditions, the risks of SOA outweigh the rewards. In order to reliably benefit from the use of SOA, organizations need to track the Mission Thread instances, or transactions, flowing across their federated systems and quickly remedy any failures.

This presentation gives examples of how Mission Thread Management addresses these issues through such facilities as:

•	Automatic discovery of all services and application components within a given enclave
•	Following distributed Mission Thread instances (transactions) end-to-end across the SOA system and logging each instance
•	Raising alerts and taking action upon deviation in behavior or timing of Mission Thread behavior
•	Pinpointing the exact location of the breakage, providing the support team with rapid insight into how and why a given problem occurred
•	Solutions to repetitive errors can then be developed to proactively fix the Mission Thread before it breaks

By providing visibility at all levels of the Mission Thread and automatically raising alerts when problems occur, Mission Thread Management allows support teams to dramatically increase the quality of service provided by the Mission Thread.

"Determining SOA Success"

Speaker: JP Morgenthal

Track: Change Management

The number one question posed to managers of SOA-based initiatives, both internally and externally is, “was your SOA initiative successful?” The interesting aspect of this question is that it cannot be answered. It's equivalent to asking, “was your blueprint successful.” A design that is not implemented has no value. Thus, the only means of ascertaining success is by implementing the design. However, even here measuring the value that SOA has contributed to the overall output is questionable since it will be combined with other implementation factors. However, there are points where the value of SOA can be uniquely measured. These are based on the ability to introduce change in a controlled manner and the increase in reuse of services throughout the organization.

This session will focus on identifying SOA success factors, such as granularity, reuse, versioning, accessibility and configurability. It will additionally illustrate methods of applying quantitative measurement to finally answer the question, “was your SOA initiative successful?”

"Organizational Challenges for SOA Adoption - It’s all about the People"

Speaker: Aaron Drew and Jessica Zucal

Track: Change Management

In this presentation we discuss the significant transformative challenges associated with developing and using SOA architectures. The development, operations and end-using communities are all faced with adoption risks related to organization change dynamics which when appropriately addressed can be effectively managed. Lessons learned from the complex organizational change management programs of large scale ERP implementations don’t necessarily provide useful insights into managing the organizational dynamics of SOA implementations. We are on new terrain. We will explore one important aspect of transformative change: the “push” and “pull” of Organizational Change Management (OCM), its relation to the rest of the transformation process, and specifically how we can apply transformative techniques to more effectively manage SOA architecture adoption. Specifically we will talk about SOA development start-up and striking the balance between fostering innovation through collaboration (pull) and a more rigorous management of architecture implementation (push).

The creation of a Strategy Roadmap is a central theme about which we can tie elements of the OCM framework. Using the DoD Business Mission Area (BMA) as an example we will highlight exemplary approaches to communications, stakeholder analyses and socialization techniques, and organizing Communities of Interest (COI’s) and other specialized teams to address key technical and business issues. There were coordinated magazine articles, vendor studies, symposiums and presentations made to introduce key messaging and provide overall architectural direction. The Roadmap not only provides a compass with guidance on a daily basis but becomes quite useful as a communications vehicle to interact with governance and oversight groups such as the GAO and Congress.

We will look at how SOA approaches can increase collaboration, as one dimension to transformation, and how the organizational change dynamics can constrain its adoption and control its effectiveness. Transformation should not only change an organization but also make it more open to change, more change-able. We will apply these transformative lessons learned to the process of adopting and exploiting SOA architectures, and describe an appropriate use of the Organizational Change Management framework.

Implementing change in a complex enterprise poses a number of unique challenges. A Complex Enterprise is a federation of organizations that maintain some level of independence of action and interact with one another either through transactions or some level of collaboration to accomplish their mission. Complex Enterprises can be multi-tiered and defined only by tracing transactions. We will take a look at some core enterprise services and how they were developed.

Good change management will increase the level of buy-in as each organization in the value system better understand its role in ‘customer’ outcomes. Process interoperability will be improved and transaction costs will go down significantly. Good change management will reduce the risk of deployment and should result in earlier benefits realization as a result of SOA-based services and SOA enabled workflows.