It was that experience that convinced an enterprise architect at Caterpillar to implement portfolio management tooling – a decision he credits with greatly improving IT’s ability to respond to initiatives and a significant labor saving success.

Mark Zielinski, strategist and enterprise business process architect at Caterpillar, explains that the seriousness of the challenge hit home when he was asked to provide a business partner with a comprehensive inventory of applications in use at a model manufacturing facility, and couldn’t. According to Zielinski it took an architect working on site for 30 days to ferret out all the bits and pieces and deliver a complete report. Zielinski spoke as part of a recent Troux Technologies webcast that covered portfolio-related issues.

Zielinski and crew wanted to be sure they could inventory the applications. As a result, Zielinski noted, he and Caterpillar implemented Troux Enterprise Portfolio Management. That software now provides visibility into more than 2000 applications and allows Zielinski immediate access to the mix at any given Caterpillar site.  He compares the “heat map” produced by Troux to a view of the company’s DNA.

He credits that capability with saving labor and speeding the process of developing reference architectures.  Longer term, Zielinski says the information gives product owners and architects the detailed information they need to support transformation initiatives.  It also has a role in application rationalization and as a “facility configurator” when new sites are brought online.

Thus, Caterpillar – a giant, growing multinational – arrived at a situation where its ability to engage in meaningful transformations – of the business or of IT – are better enabled.

- Alan Earls, Contributor

“In the past, the world of the IT development manager was different”, said Mike Gilpin, Forrester  VP and Research Director, who chatted with us about the upcoming event.  “You were much further away from the customers, and the usage tended to be focused on accounting or human resources – supporting the (in-house) operations of the company,” said Gilpin.

It’s true.  It was not long ago that IT built its applications primarily for in-house users. Most new apps directly face customers; that places new responsibilities on development managers to ensure the applications are easy for customers to use. Now they are built for the general public, and development managers are more toughly measured on how easily their applications work. Inability to deliver engaging experiences may mean business lost to competitors.

”Just as QA is now everybody’s business, so is customer experience,” said Gilpin.

Greater agility is required – in every way. There is more ground to cover – everything is connected to the Web.

The world is increasingly digital. Application delivery leaders are finding they are under much more pressure to deliver. ”Today, you are on the hot seat,” Gilpin said.

He’s right. The Web has changed the frequency of application integration updates. IT no longer works a year or more to build something that will remain unchanged for up to a decade. We have rolling launches and continuous integration based on Agile principles. This too is front and center at Forrester’s Application Development & Delivery event.

Many of the presenters at the event are familiar to readers of SearchSOA.com pages. Jon Rymer and Phil Murphy discuss the impact of Information Technology-to-Business Technology transformation. Mike Gualtieri talks about how application development teams can get better at designing user experiences. And
Dave West, familiar to readers of sister publication SearchSoftwareQuality.com, outlines the connection between Agile development and customer-facing design.

If you are a solutions architect, enterprise architect or application development manager, and customer-delighting application integration building is not naturally in your DNA, an event like this may be worth consideration. If you are not going to be in Boston, SearchSOA.com will be there reporting on the event for you.

The bugaboo that also haunts data integration projects — you say “bill,” I say “invoice” — is something project managers need to solve in business process modeling for application development.

A recent example  Berard offered was the design of Seagate’s failure analysis common tracking system (FACTS) application, which is used to find the root cause of failures in product design or manufacturing so they can quickly be corrected.

In a competitive business like disk drive manufacture the quicker a failure can be remedied, the quicker a new product gets to market.

To develop the FACTS application required WebEx meetings and conference calls with stakeholders from all the Seagate facilities involved including manufacturing sites in Thailand, China, Malaysia, and Singapore, as well as design centers in Oklahoma City, Minneapolis, and Singapore.

During these meetings, the project manager captured the processes that existed in the various locations using a business process modeling and analysis tool, the newly released Metastorm ProVision 6.1  enterprise modeling product.

The first thing the analyis revealed was the while Seagate’s goal was to have one failure analysis process, there were approximately 25 to 30 different processes in the company.

But after further review, that wasn’t as bad as it first looked.

“Come to find out, we did have a lot of processes,” Berard said. “but what was revealed was that they were really doing the same process, but calling the activities different names.”

So the issue was resolved in the conference calls by getting all the stakeholders around the world to agree to call the failure analysis activites by the same set of names, she said.

Once that was done a common model for FACTS was created, which then became the requirements document for the $5 million application development project.

Now, everybody involved in failure analysis at Seagate uses the same terminology as well as the same Web-based FACTS application.

That’s the reason Red Hat Inc. bought Amentra Inc., a integration services provider headquartered in Richmond, VA., which specializes in providing SOA knowledge transfer for its clients. In making this deal, Red Hat is betting that Amentra can provide the consulting services needed to support JBoss,  the middleware company Red Hat acquired two years ago.

In a recent Q&A interview at JBoss World, Craig Muzilla, vice president of middleware business at Red Hat, talked about the pain points organizations run into when tackling SOA.

In an interview after the Amentra deal closed this week, Muzilla stressed how important SOA expertise is to the middleware market in general and JBoss in particular.  He said companies making the transition from legacy mainframe or client/server to SOA often lack the expertise in-house to do the job.

“Amentra has a unique methodology focused around knowledge transfer,” he said. “Not only do they help design SOA and help the customer do some projects and implement project, but they also transfer that knowledge so the customer can be more self-sufficient.”

Bradley F. Shimmin, principal analyst of application infrastructure at Current Analysis LLC. agreed that knowledge transfer is one of the strengths Amentra adds to Red Hat and JBoss. Saying that this acquisition is “a perfect fit for Red Hat,” he noted that existing consulting services for JBoss had relied heavily on partnerships, and were not a match for the consulting services offered by the larger SOA vendors, such as IBM. The Amentra acquisition will begin to help close that gap.

Providing consulting in support of JBoss may be critical if Red Hat is too rearch its announced goal of capturing 50 percent of the enterprise middleware market by 2015.

In the blogsphere, Red Hat has received some criticism for its marketing of the JBoss products, which Muzilla sought to clear up earlier this week on Dana Blankenhorn’s ZDNet blog.

After the Amentra deal was announced, Larry Dignan, also blogging on ZDNet, wrote: “The deal, announced Thursday, gives Red Hat some foot soldiers to sell the company’s stack of software including JBoss. which has been a tough sell.” 

Of course, Amentra is not on a par with something like IBM Global Services.

Shimmin notes that Amentra is based on the East Coast and that is where most of its clients are located, although it is doing work as far West as Chicago and Texas. The company is looking at expanding further West to the Pacific Coast. Plans to have any European or international operations seem to fall into the yet-to-be-determine category.

That’s no surprise, the reuse, performance, management and ownership aspects of SOA are, literally, a sea change for a lot of IT organizations. This is business as unusual.

With that in mind, we’ve put together our Pragmatic SOA Governance Seminar, a free one-day event which covers the design time, runtime and business aspects of SOA governance. The material is geared toward key decisions makers in your IT organization – CTOs, enterprise architects and app dev managers. The seminar will go beyond theory and focus on actionable steps you can take to achieve SOA governance right now.

The dates and locations of the seminars are:

• February 21, San Jose, CA
• February 26, Reston, VA
• February 28, Mt. Laurel, NJ

Those interested in attending need to submit a registration form or call Lauren Nickerson at 781-657-1782.

One of the leading lights in the SOA community, Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group, will be presenting the main sessions. In addition there will be a user case study presented in each of the three cities: Transunion in San Jose, the Department of the Interior in Reston and Synovus Financial in Mt. Laurel. Each of these users has gone through the hard work of implementing an enterprise-wide SOA and will share their hands-on experiences about best and worst practices when it comes to SOA governance.

We’ve taken pains to make sure this seminar won’t be the standard boilerplate presentation of SOA governance with some vendors then saying all you need to do is buy Product X and your governance needs will be solved. These events will identify specific governance pain points and offer up sensible solutions. At SearchSOA.com we hold ourselves to a high standard. Just as we take pains to give you independent, in-depth of SOA-related news (instead of repackaged press releases), we’ve made sure that you can walk away from this seminar with a laundry list of SOA governance action items.