Long term readers know my liberal political leanings. So it should come as no surprise to them that I read liberal blogs like Washington Monthly. But this isn’t a post about politics, it’s a post about planning:

This kind of long-term planning — in politics, in business, in nearly every walk of life — is something that nearly everyone says they support, but when push comes to shove very few people are willing to back it up. There’s always something this week, or this month, or this year that seems uniquely crucial and demands our attention. Next year there will be something else, and the year after that something else again. The long-term stuff simply never gets done unless someone like Dean is willing to go to the mat for it.
[Building a Better Movement – Kevin Drum]

I don’t have much to add to this, except that planning is a big part of architecture, especially architecture in the enterprise (which may or may not be “Enterprise Architecture”). Who “goes to the mat” for the long-term stuff at your company? Or does the long-term stuff simply never get done?

Two years ago, Auburn was on the outside looking in on the BCS title game. If things continue as they are, we’re looking at a logjam at the top worse than 2004 or 2003.

At this point, nearly half way though the season, Ohio State has the #1 slot sewn up, assuming they win all their games. Their only remaining game against a ranked opponent is Michigan. Michigan already beat then #2 ranked Notre Dame, so this will be no cake walk for Ohio State. But, let’s assume they win since they fall out of the national title hunt if they lose.

After that comes the logjam. This week’s coaches’ poll has the remaining unbeaten teams ranked as such: #2 USC, #3 Auburn, #4 West Virginia, #5 Florida and #6 Michigan. This week’s AP poll has Auburn #2 and USC #3, and the rest of the unbeatens the same. These polls are VERY close. In the AP poll, Auburn and USC are separated by only 28 votes. West Virginia, Florida and Michigan are only 53 votes apart, with West VA and Florida only 2 votes apart!

Of the six unbeaten teams, only four will survive to the end of the season. As I said above, Michigan plays Ohio State at the end of the season plus Auburn plays Florida in two weeks. Of the six teams, Florida has the hardest schedule. They play four currently ranked teams, two on the road (LSU, @Auburn, Georgia, @Florida State). USC has three games against ranked teams, but none are in the top ten and their all at home (Oregon, Cal and Notre Dame). Ohio State has probably the easiest schedule, with only one game against ranked opponent – i.e. Michigan – and they get them at home.

So assuming Ohio State, Auburn, USC and West Virginia all run the table, it’s a toss up who will be ranked #2 and play Ohio State in the BCS title game. Both USC and Auburn are #2 in one of the two major polls. Auburn has three games against ranked opponents (two remaining + their 7-3 victory over then-#6-ranked LSU). USC has four games against ranked opponents (three remaining + their 28-10 victory over then-#19-ranked Nebraska). But none of USC’s ranked opponents are in the top ten and all of Auburn’s are (at least currently). So who has the edge? Who knows? I do know that in this situation, either Auburn or USC will be left out in the cold. Not to mention West Virginia who has basically no chance to crack the top two unless someone stumbles.

I’m predicting lots of complaining at the end of the season. Like every season where there’s more than one unbeaten team. I’m begriming to believe that’s why the BCS was created, so that fans can focus their hostility on computers rather than the polls.

Update: I forgot to mention the ultra nightmare BCS scenario. If USC, Auburn and Michigan run the table, you’ll likely have a USC vs. Auburn title game with Michigan ranked #3. That means Michigan would have beaten both then-ranked #1 and #2 during the season, but wouldn’t get a shot at the title.

There’s a new version of WL Writer, so I spent a little time updating my Gamer Card Writer Plugin. The big addition in this version is support for the different card styles from MyGamerCard.net. Also, I added a preview, so you can see what the card will look like before you insert it into your post.

Rather than post it here, I submitted it to the Windows Live Gallery, since they’ve added an area for Writer Plugins. You can download it from there.

Even though I moved offices just a month ago, we moved again today. New office won’t be ready until Monday, so I “worked from home”. Of course, with two kids too young for school, getting much actual work done is essentially impossible. I did manage to get my blog upgraded to dasBlog 1.9 during the kids’ naps.

My new office building is “Issaquah Black” which is a much cooler name than “18″ or “Sammamish C”. The building used to be a Boeing building. In fact, my old next door neighbor used to work in this building, back when he and I lived a scant 2.5 mile / 6 minute commute from here. Boeing moved him to Everett and apparently decided to get rid of the building. A year ago, I moved to a new house on the outskirts of Redmond, so my commute is 12.5 miles / 20 minutes. Significantly longer than if I had never moved, but I love my house and can easily deal with a 20 minute commute. Even though main campus is closer (only 8 miles), with all the rush hour traffic it takes closer to 45 to get there!

Last week, I attended an SOA workshop presented by SOA Systems and delivered by “top-selling SOA author” Thomas Erl. It was two SOA-jammed days + the drive to Vancouver and back primarily discussing SOA with Dale. In other words, it was a lot of SOA. I went up expecting to take Erl to task for his “Services are Stateless” principle. However, that turned out to be a misunderstanding on my part about how Erl uses the term stateless. However, while Erl and I agreed on optimizing memory utilization (which is what he means by stateless), that wasn’t much else when it came to common ground. As I wrote last week, Erl’s vision of service-orientation is predicated on unrealistic organizational behavior and offer at best unproven promises of cost and time savings in the long run via black box reuse.

Erl spends a lot of time talking about service reuse. I think it’s safe to say, in Erl’s mind, reuse is the primary value of service orientation. However, he didn’t offer any reason to believe we can reuse services any more successfully than we were able to reuse objects. Furthermore, his predictions about the amount of reuse you can achieve are completely made up. At one point, he was giving actual reuse numbers (i.e. 35% new code, 65% existing code). When I asked him where those numbers came from, Erl admitted that they were “estimates” because “there hasn’t been enough activity in serious SOA projects to provide accurate metrics” and that there is “no short term way of proving” the amount of service reuse. In other words, Erl made those numbers up out of thin air.

This whole “serious” or “real” SOA is a major theme with Erl. One the one hand, I agree that SOA is a horribly overused term. Many projects labeled SOA have little or nothing to do with SO. On the other hand, it seems pretty convenient to chalk up failed projects as not being “real” SOA so you can continue to spout attractive yet completely fictional reuse numbers. I asked about the Gartner’s 20% service reuse prediction and Erl responded that low reuse number was because the WS-* specs are still in process. While I agree that the WS-* specs are critical to the advancement of SO, I fail to see how lack of security, reliable messaging and transactions are holding back reuse. If anything, I would expect those specs to impede reuse, as it adds further contextual requirements to the service.

While I think Erl is mistaken when it comes to the potential for service reuse, he’s absolutely dreaming when it comes to the organizational structure and behavior that has to be in place for this potential service reuse to happen in the first place. I’m not sure what Erl was doing before he became a “top-selling SOA author,” but I find it hard to believe it included any time in any significantly sized IT shop.

Erl expects services – “real” services, anyway – to take around 30% more time and money than he traditional siloed approach. The upside for spending this extra time and money is the potential service reuse. The obvious problem with this is that we don’t know how much reuse we’re going to see for this extra time and money. If you spend 30% more but can only reuse 20% of your services (as Gartner predicts), is it worth it? If you end up spending 50% more but are only able to reuse 10% of your services, is it worth it? Where’s the line where it’s no longer worth it to do SOA? Given that there’s no real way to know how much reuse you’re going to see, Erl’s vision of SOA requires a huge leap of faith on the part of the implementer. “Huge leap of faith” doesn’t go so well with “corporate IT department”.

Furthermore, the next IT project I encounter that is willing to invest any additional time and money – much less 30% – in order to achieve some theoretical organizational benefit down the road will be the first. Most projects I’ve encountered (including inside MSIT) sacrifice long term time and money in return for short term gain. When asked how to make this 30% investment happen, Erl suggested that the CIO has to have a “dictatorial” relationship with the projects in the IT shop. I’m thinking that CIO’s that adopt a dictatorial stance won’t get much cooperation from the IT department and will soon be ex-CIO’s.

In the end, I got a lot less out of this workshop than I was hoping to. As long as SO takes 30% more time and money and the primary benefit is the same retread promises of reuse that OO failed to deliver on, I have a hard time imagining SO making much headway.

PS – I have a barely used copy of “Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design” if anyone wants to trade for it. It’s not a red paperclip, but it’s like new – only flipped through once. 😄