I’m going to use this post to record the discussion that generated during the Impact 2008 SOA Jam for my idea about “Too ManyESBs, Skill Spread too thin”. Now that Impact is over, I’d like to keep a copy of it’s point in time, and also allow any future readers to add comments.

ESB: Too many products, Skill spread too thin
Dan Zrobok 10 Apr 2008

Abstract

If you want an ESB you can use: WAS, WPS, WESB, DataPower, Message Broker. Based on my selection, I have to find deeply skilled resources on that specific product. Is IBM spreading the community too thin?

Read the rest of this entry »

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So today is apparently the final day of the SOA Jam at Impact 2008. Overall I saw a few overall themes in the ideas:

• Ideas on how to engage the business with SOA
• Tons of Ideas on How to create a “Smart SOA” community
• Ideas for needed case studies mostly from a generic non-provider viewpoint.

The one I’m most enthusiastic about is creating a community, so it was nice to see the largest proportion of ideas occur around it. I guess the ball is now in IBM’s court to begin the next steps towards resolution. I’d sure like to know (and be involved) in as much as possible but I’m going to assume these things will occur behind closed-confidential doors.

Overall, the SOA Jam turned in 73 ideas with 289 comments. We started off with 22 ideas and 70 comments, then 44 ideas and 146 comments. There was a real explosion of activity yesterday with double the usual 70 comments. I don’t know why IBM decided to end the jam a day early. I’m hoping it’s because there’s some kind of aggregation session they want to do on Friday.

As for my own ideas, “Too Many ESBs” turned in 152 views and 24 comments of it’s own. It broke down to most people agreeing with the premise and I think that ‘neilwd’ summarized the solution the best:

If we can start to build more standardized ways of engaging with technologies that fulfill common functions, that will really help companies find people from broader skill bases.

Along that line, I realized something. IBM has spent a considerable amount of time to embrace open standards on the transport level, data modeling level etc but we’ve never really seen any standard emerge on the user interface side other than the usability. Is that the result of a lack of focus, that the job is too hard to implement or what it would reduce branding opportunities amongst vendors?

Anyway I’m happy with the road this idea took during the Jam. It’s 2nd in most views and 2nd in most comments.

I’m also satisfied with my plight for an external community (8 comments, 72 views). I picked up a few email addresses of people who are also interested in the topic so I’ll try and see what I can do from that avenue. Again, unless theres some IBM buy-in though, it will be extremely difficult.

All-in-all, I feel like the Jam was just starting to gain momentum and was cut short but it remains to be seen when the doors will actually close.

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Over a twitter yesterday, James Governor lamented about the lack of official web 2.0 happenings a conference where we’re all talking about mash-ups, integrating communities and mass enablement. IBM’s youTube Channel has a single 1 minute video from day one, theres a twitter account created of the name “Impact2008“* which has no activity. Heck, even IBM’s official blog hasn’t been updated past day one.

(*unknown who it was created by, but as far as I know there is no official twitter).

It would have been cool to say, allow participants to ask questions in keynote Q&A over twitter as well as the microphone. Maybe presenters could offer informal times to talk to eager listeners once the session is over. How about if IBM aggregated the Impact ‘blogosphere’ and gave us a single place to look for what people are saying about the conference? What if I’d like to try and track down Steve Mills for a two minute interview. Where is he? There’s six thousand people walking around. If I want any of those things, it’s completely dependent on my own social network to make it happen. If I don’t happen to have a person in my list then it’s left to fate and circumstance if we’ll ever meet. Once again, we need IBM to take the first steps to make this happen. It’s great that I now follow the guys from RedMonk and various people who tagged #impact2008, but it’s still just the voices of the people ‘in the dark’ (non-IBM). Without IBM, we can talk all we want about changes that are needed but there’s no buy in from the sole required enabler. The idea that IBM can show up at predetermined times on the calendar, fire-hose the community with information and then disappear are long dead.

It seems like the conference itself is actually an accurate reflection of the state of the SOA community as a whole. You’ve got a large mass of people who would do a great job collaborating with each other and networking, but no catalyst to make it happen. Instead of being energized as part of a broader community, you get isolated and bored. I think I see that effect in how the number of articles/twitters/blogs about Impact 2008 has dropped off significantly from the first day to the third. Even the #impact2008 tag has one message on it over the last 13 hours.

In the SOA Jam, about 80% of the ideas relate to social networks and how to build communities but we’re already failing on a very small scale with people in the same physical location! How can we expect to snap our fingers and create a vibrant self-sustaining community on the large if we can’t do it on the small?

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Well I must say I was taken aback when I saw that that my SOA Jam ESB question was responded to by Steve Mills:

Steve Mills is a senior vice president and group executive, IBM Software Group. In this capacity he is responsible for directing the development, marketing, sales and support of IBM’s software portfolio. Mr. Mills is a member of IBM’s Operating Team, Performance Team, Values & Integration Team and the Asian Task Force.

It’s not everyday that you get someone at Steve’s level to respond to something you say. Of course, I’ll be right back in there with my rebuttal but this definitely made my day.

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It’s now day two of SOA Jam and it’s has been running for about 48 hours now. While the overall rate remains the same as yesterday, it feels like there’s more going on in the Jam.

As of today, we have 44 ideas and 146 comments. It look like the Jam will produce about 20 ideas and 70 comments a day. I still think this number is low for a conference with attendance this large. I wonder if IBM could have done a better job quantifying exactly what they are going to do with the ideas once the 72 hours are complete.

Also ThinkPlace itself isn’t exactly easy to understand. We have ideas in the first “Peer Review” stage. I don’t understand what exactly is required for someone to claim themselves as a catalyst in order to get to to stage 2 “Accepted by a Catalyst”. It’s even more unclear what the elusive stage 3 is as no ideas have made it that far. It’s great that IBM wants to solicit ideas from the field, it’s bad if they’re just shuffled into a database to die.

As for my own ideas, the momentum that they generated originally has fallen off. The external community idea has 6 comments, 58 views (top 15% in views) and has been accepted by a catalyst. What I’m supposed to do with it now is unknown. I’d love to have the ability to work with IBM and see what can/can’t be done in this space and I plan on maintaining contact with the catalysts (from IBM and Wells Fargo), but I’m uncertain of what real change will be brought.

The “Too many ESB product” idea originally began as “No really, theres too many ESBs, simplify them down to one” but as the comments came in I realized that it’s not the runtimes that need to be ‘immediately’ normalized but rather the tools. There’s little logical reason why mapping messages is a different tooling construct for all five products. This idea is currently languishing on page 2 with 9 comments but 90 views (2nd or 3rd most views in the Jam). But it’s still stuck in the “Peer Review” state with no catalyst. This issue isn’t quite something a non-IBMer can pick up and run with.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, head over to the Impact 2008 SOA Jam and go vote for my ideas participate in the community. The Jam ends Thursday at 10am pacific.

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I like Twitter for it’s honesty and humor, and I have enjoyed reading all the blogs that mention IBM Impact 2008. One thing that is a little surprising to me is that the universe of blogs on the topic is pretty low. My list of links includes about 6-8 people that I’ve been able to track down. 6000 attendees and not that many open opinions to read. What has been written, though, is very well done. It’s refreshing to be part of a community that critically thinks and decomposes the noise from the signal.

I’m a little too busy to go back and comment on the specifics of the postings, but I look forward to hear what Day 2 had to offer.

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From the newswire (eWeek), IBM Partners Blocked from Rational Conference.

At least one vendor, Genuitec, maker of the MyEclipse IDE (integrated development environment) has said an IBM official called its representative and told them Genuitec was not welcome at the Rational Software Development Conference this year. Another company, AccuRev, which markets software configuration management and other solutions that compete with Rational’s products, received a similar call. Both companies attended RSDC last year and exhibited in the event’s exhibit area.

Maybe this is one of the inhibitors to the creation of the external WebSphere community that I long for. If they want to say that it’s a closed-door conference for Rational, that’s fine. But why were they allowed to attend previously?

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Seeing how I’m not at Impact 2008, my impressions are going to be more geared towards what I see being said in the blogs, the twitter stream and the participation in the SOA Jam.

My first impression comes from the SOA Jam, where I think I’ve posted two pretty good ideas. The first being that we desperately need IBM to foster an external community. The other that the ESB products overlap too much, reducing the pool of skilled applicants. IBM says that 6000 people are in attendance for this conference, yet the total number of entries after day one of the Jam is 22 with 70 comments. That means that we’re jamming with 0.3% idea generation and 1.1% commenting participation rates (assuming no duplicates). I find this to be very low for a Jam that ends Thursday morning. It will be interesting to see what happens the rest of the week with the numbers. I’m not sure if there is any actual active promotion of the jam going on, or participants just don’t care.

As for my contributions, they seem to be progressing at an acceptable rate. I’ve got five comments about the external community where most are in agreement and three on the ESB. The external community is the one that I hope sinks in and takes hold. It’s low hanging fruit that IBM can leverage, whereas modifying the architecture for various products is more of a dream that I’m hoping finds roost in the head of someone who matters.

On the ESB side, I’m getting kind of what I expected: some agreement some disagreement. The disagreements usually come when someone makes the point that they are all targeted to different users. I say that at a high level, they all do the same thing. I accept that the runtimes are unique and will likely never change. That doesn’t preclude changing the tooling to be uniform.

I’m a developer, I’m already implementing systems (in WID) in an abstract way with boxes that represent functionality and lines that represent relationship. Why can’t what runtime I choose to deploy my solution to be abstracted as well?

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Shout out to James Taylor who has identified how to follow the tweets that are going on during the conference. I also suggest that people follow Michael Cote on Twitter, I added him to my mobile device updates yesterday afternoon and got about 40 updates so expect to feel like you are there on the front lines.

I’m extremely new to Twitter, I created an account last night: danZrobok and also added it to the column on the right. Feel free to follow along, I expect to use it a lot at the WebSphere Services Technical Conference in May.

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Just quickie that Smart Enough Systems are also blogging Impact 2008 in depth. Very In depth. Like three articles already posted depth. Good job!

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I’m not at Impact, so I’m a little diminished in my capacity to know who’s there, who’s blogging, what’s being talked about or exactly how many boat races Steve Mills can win in a row.

Thanks to Michael Coté who is also blogging the conference and has his recap of the first few hours of Impact.

A second big thank you to him goes out for letting me know that Dana Gardner also has a post about the first three hours of the conference.

I find both posts extremely informative and I hope they’ll continue to post through out the week. I recommend readers sign up for their RSS/Atom feeds as I doubt I’ll be able to keep up on Impact from the East Coast while the SOA Party rages on the west.

Also, if you are in attendance of Impact 2008, you can go to the session run by MTS Allstream. They are one of my clients and I had a very minor role in helping out with their slides (at one point I was going to co-present but it fell through). If you do sit in, feel free to let me know what you thought.

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I’m on a roll right now with the Impact 2008 SOA Jam (a few hours before it opens officially of course)

Anyway, the link is here and the content of the jam follows:

What would implementing this idea accomplish?

Some kind of consolidation needs to occur at either a runtime level, or tooling. Unify the programming models to enable a single skilled resource the ability to work with all of these products interchangeably. They all accomplish the same goal of transforming messages from a source to a destination, but all do them in vastly different ways.

How would it work? How might it be implemented?

If the tooling is unified: I get a ‘candy’ ui that decides the type of artifacts to generate based on the runtime I select. I foresee say using the WID editor with business object mapping, but deploying to a DataPower device which receives the XSLT equivalent. If it was to message broker, different runtime artifacts are created.

What are the benefits to the stakeholders of this idea?

This gives me, as a practitioner, a chance to be skill enabled at the developer level for the entire ESB stack. Increasing the range of gigs that I can accept. It also lowers the cost to customers who will have a larger pool of skilled workers to select from. It helps IBM by reducing the redundancy that exists in the platforms as they stand now.

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I’ve posted my idea for an External Practitioners Community to the Impact 2008 SOA Jam.

It can be viewed here (if you sign up)

For those of you not inclined to participate, I’ve included the text below:

What would implementing this idea accomplish?

Currently, if I am a non-IBM practitioner on the WebSphere stack, I have about three ways to resolve an issue.

1) Google.
2) DeveloperWorks
3) ibm.com support
4) open a PMR

Result #1 is insufficient as there just aren’t yet enough users out there sharing information.

DeveloperWorks is great, but I only get articles on topics that the authors find value in, not what I need to know. In addition, the turnaround for articles is very long (4+ months to get a topic approved).

ibm.com support pages are good if I know the exact technical reason for my exception trace. Most APARs though get published with titles that don’t reflect the situations of the problem.

PMR’s are great for me as a user but terrible for IBM as a company as someone now has to be dedicated to ‘single handedly’ resolving my problem. Most developers would prefer to be given the tools to problem solve on their own, not have to open a PMR and spend 2-3 weeks in resolution.

There was an external community filled with practitioners, it’s highly likely that I wouldn’t be the first person to run into the problem, and for the work of one reader with experience I may save myself and the IBM corporation significant time.

http://blog.danzrobok.com/2008/03/03/the-lack-of-a-non-ibm-websphere-community/

How would it work? How might it be implemented?

I have a list of ideas on how I believe the idea of an external community could be implemented.

1) A weekly external conference call for practitioners. This could begin as IBM-hosted and when the community hits critical mass, it could be offloaded.

2) Expose the PMR system to the web. Stop the charade of “My PMR is the only one in the world”. All I want from my product is to enable me to succeed for my customer. Give me the ability to see if what I’m running into has already been reported. As it stands now, I’ll spend 3-4 days explaining and re-explaining my problem to support before arriving at this stage.

3) Make developers available for an hourly chat on a rotating basis. Developers need more exposure to the actual users in the field. I say rotating because you don’t need the same people every week, but a once a month or two would be nice.

4) Officially support the DeveloperWorks forums. They’re hosted on an IBM server, but a lot of legitmate questions go unanswered. This leaves these people either disenfranchised that IBM doesn’t care, or to open a PMR. PMRs should be allowed to occur from the forum or monitored in some official capacity.

5) Feature Request System – Exposed. The turn around time from feature request to product implementation is proably on the order of two years. Most customers feel like it’s pointless to bother opening them. Let them see that the feature is being considered for inclusion, what level, or even a reason why it’s not valid or can’t be addressed. Stop treating us underprivileged citizens how don’t have a need to know.

6) Article Request System – I’d like to be able to both propose article topics and write my own article topics based on the demand from the community. Right now, I don’t see that capability anywhere.

7) External Product Wiki – Wikis are valuable centers of information, yet none exist for WebSphere. Or they do and are outdated. Lets get an official editor in there. Maybe even convert the infocenter docs for each release into a wiki format. Documentation is a living thing, shipping timeslices of it doesn’t solve cutting edge problems.

What are the benefits to the stakeholders of this idea?

I’ve written a post on my blog about what I think the benefits to IBM are. In summary, I believe that a thriving external practitioners community will lower support costs, increase product quality and enrich practitioners both internal and external.

http://blog.danzrobok.com/2008/03/27/part-1-ibm-and-the-self-sufficient-websphere-community-ibms-business-case/

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For Impact 2008:

The SOA Jam is a 72-hour online discussion hosted at IMPACT 2008. Join your colleagues at IMPACT and worldwide in sharing your insights between 10:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. PDT on April 7-10, 2008. Don’t miss this opportunity to provide IBM with your input and help influence SOA success.

Sign in to the Jam and let your voice be heard!

IBM seems to be big on the whole ‘Jam’ thing. I’ve never participated in one myself but it appears like this is a chance to have your voice heard by IBM at a time (Impact) that has a lot of visibility to the IBM executives. I’ll probably jump in there and voice a few opinions and see how it goes. I think my first ‘jam’ will be along the lines of actually fostering an external IBM community like I’ve been ranting about.

The jam runs from Today (Monday) at 10am Pacific time to Thursday 10am Pacific Time.

Of course, being IBM, the jam appears to be open right now which is 10am eastern (aka 3 hours early)

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Previously, I lamented about the lack of a non-IBM community dedicated to WebSphere. In this series, I’m going to put myself in IBM shoes and describe what I would do to encourage the formation of an external community. Before I get into that, I’d like to reflect on the benefits it would bring to IBM directly (incase some high profile IBMers need a business case).

Currently, if I’m a customer and I have a serious problem I have very few avenues of non-IBM resolution. I can attempt to google in the hopes of finding other wayward souls. I can browse the infocenter included with the product. I can attempt to toggle random check boxes that I don’t understand (which may result in a more-mangled system that I started with).

Once I’ve exhausted these paths, usually on the order of an hour or three, my only choice is to open a Problem Report (PMR). A PMR is very costly to IBM. Depending on the severity and the visibility of the customer, you could have tens of people on a conference bridge talking about your issue. Eventually, X days go by and you get an answer to the problem. You’ve spent hours of your own time on the phone and hours*attendees of time from the people on the phone. Thats a significant amount of dollars.

The worst part is that you are usually told that the problem is resolved in a fix-pack you haven’t upgraded to yet. Wouldn’t it be nice to have been able to ask a practitioner directly your problem and maybe gotten the answer within 5 minutes because they just ran into it?

You can’t do that today because IBM keeps tight grips on information. DeveloperWorks is a fantastic technical resource. It’s problem is that it’s a massive one-directional fire-hose. You get the technical infomation based on what IBM has determined is important, not based on your own problems and experiences.

What IBM fails to leverage is that most developers are natural problem solvers and would prefer to spend hours resolving an issue on their own in order to move their projects along. Currently, IBM asks you to solve a puzzle (exception trace) without providing the pieces nor the box (for good measure, they spin you around a few times and turn the lights off too ).

Ok, so that helps support. How can open access to information help development?

Developers in IBM are like the inner most section of an onion, they’re so deeply buried in the onion they wouldn’t know a carrot when they saw one, but they could tell you things you never knew about onions. Most developers would love to hear about the exploits of the user, both good and bad. Increased exposure to the front lines would help developers when they are left with behavioral decisions. What may make sense from a developers point of view, may not work to the customer. Therefore, I would expect an increase in product quality.

What about IBM’s Consulting division (ISSW)?

ISSW’s typical business is to provide implementations of IBM products to customers. Pretty much assume the role of customer to IBM while still being IBM. Increased information helps them be more effective and be able to leverage yet another pool of resource (the external) for assistance.

Therefore, my theme in the forthcoming suggestions are all about opening the public to the vault of knowledge contained in the corporation. Lets empower the consultants to be able to serve themselves to the buffet.

Easier access to information will reduce support calls, improve product quality and improve consulting quality. This will create a self-sufficient vibrant community that will benefit everyone involved.

A colleague of mine liked the quote “If you and I exchange a dollar, each of us would still have a dollar – BUT – if you and I exchange an idea, each of us would have two ideas.”

Lets start sharing those ideas.

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