Online SOA Readiness Assessment

Oracle have just made available an online SOA Readiness Assessment,  It asks you a few questions focused around the 8 areas in Oracles SOA maturity model and then provides a report.  The assessment is obviously very lightweight, but it is worth taking for several reasons.

• It gives you some reasonable suggestions about what steps to take next.
• It provides an initial SOA maturity assessment and compares it to your peers.
• It provides links to a number of helpful resources inside and outside Oracle.

The picture shows the type of high level maturity assessment generated.,  The 8 areas in the Oracle SOA Model with their definitions are

• Business & Strategy
• Contains capabilities that provide the high-level constructs that allow the SOA initiative to proceed. This includes such things as business motivation, expected benefits, guiding principles, expected costs, funding model, etc.
• Architecture
• Contains capabilities concerning the definitions of the overall architecture and guidelines for various practitioners to ensure adherence to the architecture.
• Infrastructure
• Contains capabilities concerning the service infrastructure and tools that provide the technical foundation for the SOA initiative.
• Information
• Contains capabilities concerning the information aspects of SOA, e.g., providing Information as a Service (IAAS). This includes shared data models, message formats and schemas, master data management, content management, etc.
• Projects, Portfolios & Services
• Contains capabilities concerning the planning and building of services and the service usage guidelines of service consumers.
• Operations, Administration & Management
• Contains capabilities concerning the post deployment aspects of solutions based on a service-oriented architecture.
• Organization
• Contains capabilities concerning the development of corporate competency around SOA including the organizational structure and skills development.
• Governance
• Contains capabilities concerning the governance structures and processes that support and guide the SOA efforts. Maturity and adoption of adequate amount of governance is a leading indicator of the overall SOA success.

Remember that one of goals of a SOA Strategy is to identify the level of maturity required in each area.  Not every organization requires the highest levels to get the best value out of SOA.  For example an organization with a small service estate and correspondingly small focused projects does not require a large SOA governance infrastructure.  I’m interested to hear what people think about the assessment tool which now joins Oracles BPM assessment tool.

Downloading SOA Suite

As part of the book Matt & I have been writing I had to provide instructions on how to install SOA Suite.  It struck me that the list and download location of components that make up the SOA Suite would be useful to have so I am posting them here.

Acquiring the Software

The list of required files to install components of Oracle SOA Suite 10.1.3.4 on Windows is shown in the table below. The location column indicates the URL where the software can be located for the given component. The filename is the name of the file to download. The notes column gives additional information about what to download. Oracle database XE is only required if you do not already have an 11g or 10.1.2 Oracle database available.  Note that this list is basically the core SOA Suite on OC4J, BAM for Windows, Oracle Service Bus on WebLogic, Oracle JDeveloper and a patch set to upgrade teh core SOA Suite and BAM to 10.1.3.4 revision levels.

Hope that you find the above useful.

Let the Dummy Solve It

or Putting Fred to Work

I just had a brief conversation with my manager Bill, it went along these lines

Antony: This presentation on Enterprise Manager for the Know Your Own Product Series, should it be 30 minutes?

Antony: Oh, hang on, yes it should, I was confusing it with the Bite-Sized series which were 10-15 minutes!

Antony: Thanks for that, sorry to have bothered you.

Bill: Glad to have helped

Followed by hanging up the phone rapidly before he gave me more work.  This reminded me of a favorite problem solving technique that I had failed to use in this case.  The technique is known as “Fred in the Corner”.  I don’t remember where I came across it originally (I thought it might have been in a Timothy Lister or Gerald Weinberg book but I couldn’t find it), but I got it from somewhere else and if anyone knows where I will happily add an appropriate attribution in here.  However in the meantime the technique goes like this:

• You have a problem and you take it to Fred in the corner.
• There is always an empty seat next to Fred.
• You explain your problem to Fred, giving as much detail as you know.
• After providing all the information Fred will often solve your problem.
• Oh, Fred is a tailors dummy.

If you don’t have a tailors dummy or a puppet maybe you could use an action figure, do they do a Stephen Hawking action figure?

This approach works on the basis that often we are overlooking some information that we already know that can solve our problem for us.  The task of explaining clearly to another individual exactly what the problem is forces us to detail all our knowledge.  Using this technique has several advantages:

1. It doesn’t waste our colleagues time on something we could have solved ourselves.
2. It makes sure that we understand the problem.
3. It stops us looking like a total idiot in front of our colleagues because we don’t explain the problem, realize the solution and say “Thanks for that, sorry to have bothered you”.

So next time you have a problem to solve then give it to a dummy and let them solve it for you!