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October 31, 2005
Capgemini to Contribute SOA Notation, Methodology to OASIS
"Capgemini's SOA approach is all about the collaboration between business and IT to deliver the right systems and strategy," said Andy Mulholland, global chief technology officer for Capgemini. "This SOA notation and methodology is being contributed to help provide a standard way for IT and Business to work together to provide a clear 'big picture' view of the enterprise and to ensure that projects are able to incrementally deliver a truly service oriented enterprise."
As part of Capgemini's Integrated Architecture Framework (IAF), the methodology and notation is focused on enabling IT and business to communicate effectively to define common business service architecture. IAF then works through the various stages that are required to turn that business architecture into reality.
"By contributing this SOA methodology to OASIS, Capgemini are demonstrating our commitment in helping companies realize the promise of service-oriented architecture," said Steve Jones, CTO of Application Development Transformation at Capgemini UK, and lead on Capgemini's SOA notation and methodology. "Capgemini sees Service Oriented Architecture as being a business driven initiative and this contribution is focused on helping organisations create those business service views."
The elements of this SOA notation and methodology are focused on helping solve one of the biggest challenges in IT today -- alignment to business strategy and objectives. Further, Capgemini has released this notation and approach to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), the e-business standards group, with the goal of stimulating debate and accelerating a business-focused view of architecture within the SOA community which OASIS leads.
"This is very valuable. This notation can be used to develop formal SOA Blueprints business requirements," said Miko Matsumura, vice president of technology standards at Infravio, and chair of the OASIS SOA Adoption Blueprints Technical Committee. "This will help ensure that organizations implement Intentional SOA -- a coherent plan to continuously synchronize SOA to business goals."
"Technologists and standards groups have given enterprises some basic tools and methods, but as a community, we haven't yet done enough to describe their use in the field," observed Jamie Clark, director of standards development for OASIS. "Once you have paintbrushes and a canvas, you still have to decide what to paint. Tools to define and describe the specific services for real world business cases will be tremendous enablers for our SOA work and for shared service architectures."
"SOA is much more than just being a way of thinking but also a way of doing things," said Mark Carges, chief technology officer of BEA Systems Inc. "Our customers tell us they need better re-use of IT assets and service-enabling these assets using open standards. They are also looking for ways to orchestrate the way these assets work together, regardless of the service source or platform. Like many other IT paradigms, SOA requires a rich ecosystem of tools, technologies standards and know-how to make it a reality. We are excited to be working with Capgemini and OASIS on developing the first business notation for SOA."
This SOA notation and methodology was developed by Capgemini as a simple approach to quickly assessing complex organizations and projects and to provide a clear structure in which future requirements and architecture could be developed. This approach is based on a simple three stage iterative process that addresses the "What, Who, and Why" behind the services, actors and drivers, respectively. Each service is then examined to see if additional detail is required to determine how it works internally, and if so, the process is repeated to outline the individual components of that service. This de-composition approach helps to eliminate the challenge of service granularity and provides a consistent view from the boardroom to IT implementation.
"Oracle and Capgemini have established firm links around linking Oracle's Fusion strategy with Capgemini's SOA approach to enterprise architecture," said Edwin Khodabakchian, vice president of BPEL Development at Oracle, "Oracle see Capgemini's contribution of the first publicly available SOA methodology to OASIS as an opportunity to further standardize not only the technology but business representation of SOA. Oracle are already committed to aligning our approach to open standards and are working on delivering the tools and platforms to best enable SOA from business to implementation."
"Capgemini shares a common focus for developing best practices to support SOA adoption through the deployment of standards-based frameworks leveraging Java and Web services," said Mark Bauhaus, senior vice president of business integration, application platform and identity at Sun Microsystems. "We look forward to supporting this initiative with complementary offerings such as Sun's SOA Repeatable Quality methodology, and applaud the fact that it is being advanced with the OASIS SOA Adoption Blueprints Technical Committee -- underscoring a commitment to growing the initiative in an open forum with opportunity for community participation."
By contributing the approach and notation to the OASIS SOA Adoption Blueprints Technical Committee, Capgemini hopes to work with the other members of the group in defining both the technical, and critically, the business SOA blueprints that can provide a standard structure for the assessment and implementation of SOA projects and enterprises.
"Capgemini's SOA methodology is significant in that it clearly identifies the need to define the organizational and work boundaries intersected by services, especially where they are true business services crossing contractual boundaries or inter-organisational IT services," said Andy Ellis of Microsoft. "By emphasizing the need to develop requirements through facilitated collaboration across those contractual boundaries, the methodology provides clear practical guidance towards defining and developing effective IT services for a truly service oriented enterprise."
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