So now that I’m back, we’re beginning work in earnest on my project. For those not following along at home, my project is to deliver shared service oriented infrastructure for Microsoft’s internal IT department. We’ve spent the time since I moved over working on our business justification, and now we’re moving into specifications and prototyping. That is, I get to starting getting my hands dirty.

As part of the prototyping efforts, we’re looking to build some sample business services on top of our prototype infrastructure. The idea being to both illustrate what we’re building as well as have a playground where we can experiment with new ideas. During the prototyping, I’ll be pretty involved with the development. But once we start writing production code, the dev team will take that over but I will continue to own the service playground. I’ve been kicking a playground idea like this around for several years, so I’m pretty excited about it.

The question is, what kind of business scenario should we build? I want the sample business services to be something interesting and real-world-esque. But of course, it can’t be too complex since I wasn’t hired to build a playground as my primary job function.

So far, we have two primary ideas:

• Enterprise Management System: AdventureWorks is the primary sample database that ships with SQL Server. They have business scenarios around Sales & Marketing, Product Management, Purchasing and Manufacturing. This sounds suspiciously like an ERP/CRM/SFA type enterprise system. On the plus side, MS is an enterprise so things like ERP/CRM/SFA are the types of solutions we need/use/buy/build internally. On the negative side, it’s complex to do real-world and teams that actually do ERP/CRM/SFA inside Microsoft might dismiss the infrastructure if the playground isn’t real-world enough.
• Prediction Market: If you’ve ever seen Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX) or Tradesports, those are prediction markets. The basic idea is that you trade on predictions, rather than companies like you would in a stock market. Using HSX as an example, you get 2 million “Hollywood Dollars” (i.e. play money) to invest in upcoming movies and / or movie stars. Those movies and stars pay out based on the money they make at the box office. They also have derivatives for opening weekend, blockbusters and the Oscars. HSX even sells forecasting and prediction services based on the HSX market. Of course, I can’t build something quite so extensive, but we could get pretty far with this idea. The upside is that it’s relatively simple (compared to enterprise management systems) and there’s little conflict with existing systems inside Microsoft. The downside also is that it’s relatively simple and not like anything we’re building inside Microsoft.

I’m leaning towards the prediction market, as it sounds more fun to build and experiment with. What do you think?

I’m back from my two week vacation (note to self: two weeks is about three days too long for a three and one year old to be away from home). But here isn’t where I left it. While I was gone, my team moved into a new temporary space. On the plus side, I have an office instead of a cube, the team is all together and this area of the building is pretty deserted, so it’s quiet. On the downside, I’m sharing the office with the program manager for my project and as I said, it’s temporary. I guess there’s no point unpacking.

Update: about 30 minutes after I posted this, we got the official email that we’re moving at the end of the month.

From Presentation Zen:

It is just plain stupid to use projected slides (i.e., visuals) used in a live presentation as a document to be read later by people who did not see the talk.
[PowerPoint printouts used for communicating battle plans?]

Amen.

Nick Malik is an architect in MSIT’s Enterprise Architecture group. He’s been blogging a while, though I only discovered his blog a couple of weeks ago. Yesterday he posted about OMG’s SOA SIG’s Draft RFI on EDA and it’s relationship to SOA and BPM. That’s a veritable alphabet soup of acronyms! To translate, the Object Management Group’sSpecial Interest Group on Service Oriented Architecture has posted a draft Request for Information on Event Driven Architecture and it’s relationship to Service Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management. Here’s the summary from the actual document:

The EDA Sub-group of the OMG SOA SIG seeks information from members of the EDA, BPM and SOA community as well as anyone interested in promoting standards in this area. Requested information will be evaluated by the EDA Sub-group, resulting in the development of Requests for Proposal(s) (RFP) for standardization of Event definition, relationship between EDA, BPM and SOA that will ultimately allow development of standards for Complete Life Cycle of Events -Ontology of Events, Sense and Respond Services, Events Metrics and processing of complex events. Please note that it is our intent to develop modeling standards for the EDA/SOA and EDA-Business Process interaction and provide standards for the implementation of that interaction as well.

First off, I’m a bit wary about this part: “it is our intent to develop modeling standards”. Of course, OMG is responsible for UML and long time readers should be well aware of my opinion of UML. I don’t want to set the bozo bit on an entire organization, but I am skeptical that any new modeling “standards” from OMG will be any more effective than the Unwanted Modeling Language.

Secondly, EDA seems to be vaguely defined, if at all. Wikipedia has this to say about EDA:

An event-driven architecture (EDA) defines a methodology for designing and implementing applications and systems in which events transmit between loosely coupled software components and services. An event-driven system is typically comprised of event consumers and event producers. Event consumers subscribe to an intermediary event manager, and event producers publish to this manager. When the event manager receives an event from a producer, the manager forwards the event to the consumer. If the consumer is unavailable, the manager can store the event and try to forward it later. This method of event transmission is referred to in message-based systems as store and forward.
[emphasis in original]

Assuming events are encoded as messages, then you can rewrite “event consumers / event producers” as “message receivers / message senders” and you really blur the line with SOA?

The big difference in EDA seems to be the use of an “intermediary event manager”. The problem I have with this approach is that the “intermediary event manager” works fine if you have a small number of endpoints, but how will it scale to handle hundreds of systems? Thousands? Tens of thousands? I don’t see how the centralized event manager approach can possibly scale to handle tens of millions of events delivered between tens of thousands of systems. The management of such a system would be a nightmare? If a business process went south, you would obviously look in the central event manager as the source of the problem, but I would think that would be like finding a needle in a haystack. You could federate the event managers, instead of attempting to scale out the center. But a federated event manager approach would seem to defeat much of the purpose of an EDA in the first place. If you’re going to federate your event managers, why not cut out the middle man and make each event producer it’s own event manager as well? What is the benefit of separating these capabilities?

I guess fleshing out EDA isn’t a bad idea, but it seems more like a solution looking for a problem to me.

Wednesday Oct 4th is the season premier for Lost. Two days later on Oct 6th is the season premier of Battlestar Galactica. These are my favorite two shows – an in my opinion the best two – on TV right now. According to Major Nelson, a one hour recap of BSG called “The Story So Far” is available on XBLM. If they could post a Lost and the Lost Experience recap on XBLM, that would just be perfect.