Change

Become the change that you wish to see in the world.

- M Ghandi

Mobile Post on Emergent Order

In nature order continually emerges from chaos. In management we continually try to impose order out of fear that chaos will take over. The imposed order is most always dydfunctional. Emergent order, as in nature, is functional and arises from autonomous entities working together with a shared vision and a sense of personal mastery.

Reference: The Fifth Discipline, pg269

SOA Foundation as Connector

I have been working for the last year with Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and the infrastructure components which make up an SOA Foundation (SOAF). After reading the Connector paper by Mehta, Medvidovic, and Phadke it would seem that a SOAF should fall within the middleware category. After some thought and analysis I have come to the conclusion that SOA truly is a breakthrough technology which spans some of the categories defined in the Connector paper.

A SOAF infrastructure is largley based on message passing but includes an event bus, a data bus, facilities for content based routing, handlers for security and access control. There are also features within the infrastructure for dynamic discovery of services, service level agreement monitoring and enforcement, data mediation/transformation, and business process modeling through workflow and orchestration.

The important thought here is the sole purpose of a SOA Foundation is to provide a general purpose manged connector environment. Is it just a collection of connectors previously defined or are there new constructs defined by the environment? This concept deserves some further analysis.

Paradox Enables Break Through Thinking

An important concept that just seems to be sinking into my thought patterns is "Paradox" and the enabling forces to break through thinking. This concept has been kicking around as I try to define my thoughts surrounding:

• Innovation at the edge and its apparent contradiction to Deming
• Structure induced by enterprise architecture to enable agility, that hinders
• Non emergent teams being used to solve problems

Once we identify paradoxical behavior in a system it must be studied and analyzed. A behavior that seems to be contradictory can give the opportunity for truly innovative thinking. Paradox should be viewed as extremely important and a catalyst for moving bodies of knowledge forward.

There is an idea here that I am trying to grasp. Articulation is one of the many inhibitors...

Software Architect

This is an initial posting to my software architecture logbook for SSW565 at Stevens Institute of Technology. The course is titled "Software Architecture and Component Based Design" and begins by examining what software architecture is. This has caused me to think about not what software architecture is but what a software architect is.

To me a software architect is someone who synthesizes the structure of a software system which serves to meet some operational need. The architect is involved up front usually at a high level and is ultimately responsible for the realization of the system. Interfaces with other software, hardware, and people systems need to be negotiated and coordinated by the architect. The architect must have a firm grasp of technology and its application to specific domain problems in addition to excellent communication skills. The point where program management meets technical work will be at the architect. The architect truly has one foot in the world of management and one foot in the world of technology.

The above definition removes some of the grandiose visions of elegant structures being constructed by technically astute software professionals. But draw an analogy to a building architect for a home. The homeowner communicates desires, needs, to the architect who in turn creates a structure. The architect communicates the structure back to the homeowner for approval then communicates, negotiates, and coordinates the structure out to contractors, inspectors, and utility companies. Here you can see that the software architect is very much like the traditional architect just working with a different medium.

Dysfunction

There seems to be a common thread in the world today, "things are broken". Furthermore there is a sense of hopelessness of finding a solution. Think of your last trip to a hospital. It seems as though bad decisions get made throughout your stay and you are unable to fix them. Are these truly bad decisions or is there some higher order reason behind them.

An extended enterprise operates in this fashion. There is no central control, who is managing the extended enterprise? This is truly systems thinking at heart.

In the context of net-centricity. There are autonomous systems connected together through a higher order global information grid. If a capability is composed on the edge there are relationships formed with these autonomous systems. But the system is autonomous, what if it mutates? This is a Demming concept. Can an entity at the edge compose or modify a process/capability? Demming would say no, the process a worker is in must be improved from a higher order. Innovation at the edge says that who knows more what is required for a task more than the knowledge worker at the edge. But does this break an overarching principle of interoperability or information sharing? Can innovation at the edge be captured through advanced architecture and tooling?

This post was created fast. but there are important concepts buried here. The ideas need to be articulated in a canonical fashion. This is the subject of further study.