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...

While I was working as a senior manager in a Fortune 500 IT department, we went through a recession, and a few years later through the U.S. outsourcing offshoring trend. During the 2001 recession, management reacted with reasonable downturn planning. Business management requested a certain level of cutbacks (say 7%) and IT listed projects that could reasonably be cancelled. Things difficult to cut back (without very serious planning) such as operations - keeping the lights on, normal systems maintenance & support operations, planned regulatory system work, and required upgrades (due to vendors end-of-support-life), these were all off limits. New development and system enhancements were on the line. IT management also reacted in a normal downturn mode. Middle IT management had gotten a bit fat, so they trimmed middle management. For the remainder, they turned to their managers and instructed them to lifeboat. Those employees who weren't considered key - who weren't a subject...