Making the Cloud, Microservices, and Enterprise IT work!

When Anne Thomas Manes (of the Burton Group) famously declared in January of 2009 that "SOA is dead", everyone rushed around to understand what she meant. Being that a year later she's still giving presentations on SOA Governance and other SOA topics, clearly she didn't mean that SOA was a failed technology. (There are plenty of IT technologies that come along with much hype but never quite translate into practical usage patterns or benefits for Enterprise IT, and therefore fade away as quickly as they arrived.) Today when I'm talking with IT organizations the majority are doing some level of SOA. So clearly SOA has moved along the adoption curve. The innovators struggled with it but got and touted their early advantage. The early adopters picked it up and integrated it into their enterprise IT model. We're clearly past even the early majority and a good way into the late majority. The late majority are organizations that 2 years ago weren't consider...

I had a chat with a former co-worker at a US Fortune 50 about IT direction, what is the status for the people there now? Leading in to the conversation is the fact they formerly had a US $1 BILLION dollar IT budget, 5,000 US IT workers and another 2,000 positions outsourced (to India). First they cut that budget to $800 million, then cut a straight 25% of the US IT workforce... Friend: I miss you so much in the office... these people will chase their tales for months, its insane. Akiva: So basicaly Company has pulled back from IT being strategic to just another basic function they have to put up with? Friend: Its funny because everyone is frustrated... they all want it done the "right" way... but won't invest the money to do it that way. So we spin round and round trying to find a cheap, but "right" way to do it and it never happens. Today I'm chasing another department to get 'free' services that they don't give away free (without internal c...

I spent years in a huge Fortune 50 IT division creating an integration competency center, trying to convince project managers and IT middle management to use SOA. Or rather, to expose services offering their key application functionality. These managers often came to me requesting access to services or for us to build services allowing them access to the systems, transactions or data they needed. But when I came to them to expose their systems, transactions or data, or even more to build a service model into new application features and extensions they were working on, they almost uniformly said no. When I arrived with a request for a specific transaction with funding in hand, they would do the minimum required by the requesting system and no more. I struggled with this for years. I created presentations educating on the SOA model, showing benefits and ROI. I educated architects and senior programmers on the advantages. I spoke with systems analysts about new SOA design patterns. When...