Making the Cloud, Microservices, and Enterprise IT work!

In consulting at various companies, I'm seeing a lot of "SOA failure". Oh, the technology works and the tools are capable. Further, their developers are using a variety of SOA(ish) techniques. But their formal SOA programs, their Integration Centers, are failures. (I define failure as an unhappy department, senior management that is unhappy with the results, a general feeling of failure, unable to demonstrate and most likely without ROI, and an impression that Integration is in-the-way and provides unsufficient benefit versus the effort to engage the process.) These projecs or departments have almost always started bottom up, they are an IT department solution to pinpoint (narrow) IT problems. They've never really mapped out how they're going to get from here to "there", and have defined "there" as only an IT solution without connecting to concrete business goals. First a basic question, do you want to be “there”? The easy answer is yes, integr...

It's rather unusual to hear of programmers, non-hackers, to be arrested for programming. But today's news announces the arrest of the programmers who build the applications that operated Madoff's financial empire of cards. Apparently the programmers are not being arrested for creating something illegal, but rather for "knowing" that their systems weren't complete (and therefore could not complete the financial trading operations)... They were accused of knowing that the computer programs they developed in 2003 and 2004 contained fraudulent information used in U.S. and European regulatory reviews. The SEC said O'Hara and Perez (the arrestees) knew that the "House 17" computer was missing functioning programs needed for actual securities trading. In August or September 2006, they cashed out hundreds of thousands of dollars in their personal BLMIS accounts before meeting with Madoff and telling him they would no longer lie for him, the FBI and the...

(Part 1) Given an opportunity to build a new a set of IT systems from scratch, only the latest techniques, technologies and architectural approaches would be used. In the real world, practically every IT organization is faced with legacy applications, a nice euphemism for the old software that’s running most companies. Anywhere from 5 to 30 years old (or more), it’s running on old (style) infrastructures, operating systems, programming languages, etc. It incorporates years of business logic development. The capabilities (and failings) are well known and well understood. And you probably can’t afford to replace it. Not only do IT organizations face this problem, IT vendors face a similar challenge. Even the best known ERP and CRM systems are composites of well known functionality with bits of the new tacked on over time. In all of these cases, decomposing from the big box application model to a service oriented business function model frequently means completely replacing or rewriting...