Hotel Baths and the importance of client contracts

What is it with American Hotels in their competition to create large rooms with tiny baths. I've been in loads of Hotels and practically none of them in the US have a bath that is worth of the name "large sink" would describe most of them.

This is a cracking example of why a simple service definition isn't enough to ensure a decent quality of service. After all a bath is something that holds water, in which you can sit down, so these enlarged sinks match the basic criteria. They hold water, and if I get in one I get wet.

Now if when I specific a hotel room I could say

Bath.length > 1.2m
Bath.depth > 50cm

Thus giving a detail precondition on what I consider most important in a hotel room. I could also specify the details on the gym, to make sure its not just two crap machines in a tiny room.

Effectively here I talking about the importance of preconditions from a client perspective when selecting and invoking a service. A more business analogy would be when thinking about acceptable response times for a service, where if they don't respond in time you don't care about the result. Its about how the client can place restrictions and contracts onto the service.

The normal way to do this is via parameters on a method, but a more effective way would be via a contract applied to the call which could be managed as a policy independently of the invocation, i.e. changing acceptable response times.

Thus invocations should be about a negotiation between client and service to determine if the required conditions and QoS can be met, if they can't then the invocation is invalid, something the client should have as much say in as the service.

Seriously though, what is with US hotels? The beds are huge, the baths are tiny.

Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture

Want to get closer to your business? Then move your chair.

One of the consistent themes in IT is the disconnect between the IT department and the business. There often develops a "People's Republic of IT" which tries, vainly, to lay down policies and pretend that it should be in charge of the important decisions and that "its our way or no-way" is a reasonable approach to take. Some organisations aren't as extreme as that but almost every company I've every worked in, or with, in my whole career missed a basic fundamental point about how people collaborate.

Personally

Simple eh? When people collaborate and work together they work person to person and interact with each other. Now the real challenge is to make that effective, sure you could have a phone conference or a meeting or a quick coffee and for some bits that really can work.

But if you have something where its critical that IT and the business are working in close step and working together to deliver things then there is really only one solution.

SIT TOGETHER

Again, pretty simple but something that IT folks seem to shy away from. In the book I cover how different services require different delivery models, and for some of these its essential that business and IT become one team. Sometimes document based communication is fine, sometimes a phone call or a meeting will do, but as a basic part of operations IT should be part of the business, not a people's republic.

If you need to move closer to your business, mix up the chairs so IT sits with the business not on its own.

Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture

Marketing - when honesty isn't the best policy

Honesty in marketing, now I've commented before that I don't think that technology people will every be honest marketeers but I'd like to share a personal experience of where honestly really isn't (for the individual) the best policy.

The lady in front of me in the line didn't quite fit the people that had fallen off the plane to SFO from London, almost looked as if she had deliberately delayed her exit from a previous flight. Up she wanders looking nervous and frightened to the immigration desk, home of those great questions like "are you looking for work" and when you answer "no" following up with the genius "what if someone offers you a job while you are here", which is pretty much like "when did you stop beating your wife". So anyway she gets to the immigration guy, he looks at the passport, does a bunch of staring, asks her where she is staying and it all seems to be going fine....

Then he asks

"How long will you be here"

And she answers, honestly,

"I don't know yet, I don't know how long I can stay"

A couple of questions later and she goes off to secondary questioning.

Now I'm not saying that people should lie to get into the US (because that would get me the rubber glove treatment) but I am saying that sometimes the smart people will bend the truth to get their own aims delivered, and if you don't accept and deal with that then you are going to be going into the secondary room wondering how you got there.

Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture

Define SOA without S, O or A

I was given a challenge today to define SOA without using the terms "Service" "Oriented" or "Architecture". What I came up with was

Its a way of modelling what a business does, then understanding who it works with and why the business works with those external parties and the different parts of itself.

Now I need to get it shorter and crisper, but I prefer that to "a style of software architecture" which doesn't really help anyone.

Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture

Why Service SLA depends on consumers as much as producers (Sandisk Ultra II v Extreme III)

One of the bits that is often over looked in SOA is the importance of the consumer to an overall SLA for a service (after all the SLA is there to give the consumer assurance). I've been looking for a good example of what I mean and today I found it. I have a Canon EOS 350D, the old entry level digital camera, which is perfect for what I need. I've got 3 different brands of memory cards, all of which publish their performance SLAs. The two that interest me here though are the SanDisk Ultra II and SanDisk Extreme III. The later claims a minimum write speed twice that of the former. However if you lob it into my camera, set it on manual with a 1/4000 shutter speed and then hold down the button for 1 minute you get exactly the same number of shots out. This indicates that the issue isn't with the speed of the memory cards to determine overall performance but the speed of the camera in writing to the memory.

So here we have two services which have identical (one could say "uniform" :) ) interfaces but offer two different SLAs to consumers, these SLAs however place requirements on their consumers in order to be able to deliver the SLAs as advertised.

The point here is that a service cannot offer an SLA that reaches outside of its bounds without also placing direct requirements onto its consumers. Thus a true SLA is not simply something a service describes but is something that is negotiated between the producer and consumer for a given interaction.

Published SLAs are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to delivering truly effective business SLAs that can be relied upon.

Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture

SOA needs marketing

Communication is "The transmission of information so that the recipient understands what the sender intends." too often people in SOA projects appear to be making the same mistake that HR departments make on a regular basis, namely assuming that lobbing something onto an intranet page and acting surprised when nobody reads it.

Now I talked a while back about Selling SOA to the Business and how it was selling. Well guess what, the think about trying to communicate your SOA strategy, service repository, service or whatever is... a marketing job. You've got to think about it as a core part of your SOA approach and develop an actual marketing plan.

Bleating about people not reading documents on an intranet page (often with a helpful internal page name like /12345ofq.htm) is just dumb and people who expect that publishing an intranet page is enough should be quickly shot for their blind optimism or laziness.

Develop a communication strategy, develop a marketing plan. Work out which people you need to talk to directly and which can be done via email and who will just get a link to an intranet page. Go and speak to your corporate comms team, find out from them what can be done, a section on the intranet, a podcast, posters or inclusion in monthly briefings. Plan the launch as if you are going to market, because that is exactly what you are doing you are going to your market, its internal but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be treated in the same way.

Then once you have done your launch keep it up, its no good to have a big splash if everyone forgets about it in 3 months. Keep on the active communication front, have something on the intranet home page that just says how many services there are, how many users, how much money has been saved or whatever metric will get it noticed. Have a continual update that is easy and interesting for people to engage with.

The more I see companies struggling to communicate and then complaining when people don't come to the limited comms they've put up the more I think that SOA Marketing is becoming more and more important and that people in SOA programmes should start considering allocating marketing budgets as a core part of their operation.

Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture