I am here in Las Vegas... not gambling (yet!) but attending IBM Impact 2008 conference. Given my focus on SOA/BPM consulting and my current project where I am helping my client come up with an approach to define 'business design' (as IBM SOA Foundation calls it) and then derive SOA from the business design, it would be a mistake not to attend. At this conference, I will be focusing heavily on BPM, SOA and integration and I plan to share my daily experiences here.

Before I talk about my observations on day 0, here is some day -1 stuff: Registering online was easy and I got early registration and GWC member discounts. The registration confirmation email didn't arrive right away; I had to call to get one. The agenda builder tool on Impact 2008 was nice. You could see all sessions grouped by day, by track, by type and by speaker. You can add the session you like to your personal agenda - with the caveat that the tool won't alert you when you double book yourself. You could email your personal agenda to yourself but the functionality never worked for me (I never received the email). I had to manually add all sessions in my outlook so they could show up in my phone.

Anyway, I arrived at the conference on Sunday afternoon around 3:00 PM. The events before 3 were dedicated to the business partners. Checking in was quick and I was impressed by all the computers sitting around where you could pull up and print information about the conference, look up conference attendees and even surf the web. MGM Grand is a big hotel and finding your way around is not that easy. I would have liked more signs or IBM associates walking around to help people. In any case, I was able to walk between buildings and find places.

When I checked in, I was also told that the lab registration system had made some mistakes and as a result it confirmed my registration for part 2 event though part 1 was full. The letter stated that the lab mentor will try to accommodate me when the lab starts, let's see what happens.

After the registration, you could take certification tests for free (well, I would rather say the testing fee is included in the conference fee). This conference allows taking 3 tests per brand, so you could take 3 Rational tests, 3 WebSphere tests, 3 SOA tests and so on. I took one SOA test and passed. I might take more in the next few days. 

At 5:30, I went to the solution center and reception. Solution Center is a place where vendors come in and showcase their SOA/BPM capabilities - many of them aligned with IBM offerings. What impressed me here was a device that vendors could use to scan your badge if you stopped by and starting talking to someone at a booth. This gave them an easy way to lookup the visitor and follow up later. At some booths I found that the vendor folks were busy talking to one another and drinking, and not paying much attention to people stopping by at their booth. At some booths, people were not as warm and welcoming. In many cases however, I found that people were eager to talk about their SOA offerings. They were excited to discuss their solution and answer any questions. I met with quite a few people (vendors and attendees) and exchanged cards.

Overall, I had a good first day at the conference. Tomorrow, I plan to check out SOA Jam and probably participate in Smart SOA challenge.

I like everything about SOA except the acronym and the way SOA is described. To make more sense, let me tell you a story I read in a piece of paper stuck on somebody's cube. The story goes something like this:

A person flying somewhere in a balloon gets lost. He lowers his balloon and asks a man on the ground. "Excuse me! Could you please tell me where I am?" The person on the ground responds, "You are in a balloon about 25 feet above the ground." Hearing the response, the balloon man correctly guesses, "You must be an IT person. What you said is correct but it's of no use to me." The ground man replies (also guessing correctly), "You must be a business person. You don't know what you want, you are not asking the right questions, yet you want me to solve your problem."

The story applies very well to SOA. While the idea behind SOA is to promote a set of architectural principles that, by design, support a better alignment between business and IT, we failed to include the B for Business in the acronym. Not only that, we do a poor job at explaining it to non-technical people. Those guys have absolutely no idea what we are talking about when we use terms like service, architecture, loose coupling, interoperability etc. They only care about satisfying the business requirements. They care about business agility. They care about return on investment. And they care about not having to write an enhancement request and spend a ton of money when all they want is to see an additional field on their screen.

You see, when we 'do' SOA, we knowingly or unknowingly look at it from technical perspective. Our respected architect tells us, "You should really expose this and that system as a set of services." If he knows BPM, he would probably add, "You should also analyze your business process and identify business services from them." The architecture team starts identifying the 'toolset' to do this. The team starts debating on the granularity of services and someone keeps repeating "SOA doesn't have to be implemented using web services." (What's up with that? Enough already!)

I say, for every potential SOA project, we go back to the basics and think about the value proposition of SOA and what it does for the business. I say, we use that value proposition to explain to the business how SOA is about deriving IT architecture from business. I say, we recognize and acknowledge (rather than defend) the IT pain points business typically has and try to show how SOA helps ease the pain.

While I don't see the acronym changing, I definitely see a potential to change our approach to SOA. Remember, there is a B in SOA; you just have to find it.