ServiceOriented

And What Do You Do

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And What Do You Do

As I have posted previously, Katie Ledger’s concept of ‘Portfolio Working’ is sort of the flip-side, supply-side version of ‘Dynamic Working’ but from the staff perspective. Dynamic Work looks at how a company is more flexible with its resources such as staff. Portfolio Work looks at how a person (staff) is more flexible with its incomes such as employment for a company. From the ‘SOA’ metaphor, Katie’s concepts are ‘loose coupling of compute resources’ in action in the human world of endeavour. Now Katie has teamed up with Barrie Hopson to structure, elaborate and colour this world that she has explored and lived for many years.

Corporates have long known the benefits of having multiple suppliers, securing diverse revenue streams and building a portfolio of assets that play to their strategic strengths. This book is a must read for people who want to apply these same principles to their personal lives for careers that are rewarding both financially and personally.

The official launch is 19th November in London which I won’t miss. If any of my readers are particularly interested in this area, I have access to a few invitations to the launch which I am happy to share out on a first come, first serve basis.

E-Lance Economy

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Modularization of the Work System

The Microsoft Netherlands joint research piece with Erasmus University also cited the seminal work of Thomas W. Malone Robert J. Laubacher’s coining the term E-Lance Economy over 10 years ago in their Harvard Business Review article, ‘The Dawn of the E-Lance Economy.’

“The fundamental unit of the e-lance economy is not the corporation but the individual. Tasks are not assigned and controlled by a stable chain of management but rather are carried out by autonomous or independent contractors. E-lancers connect into fluid and temporary networks to produce and sell goods and services. When the job is done, the networks dissolve again, whereas the e-lancers start seeking for new assignments. Of course, this view still applies to a small portion of the economy yet it is clear that larger parts are moving in this direction.”

One of the aspects to the new world of work that first drew me into the subject was the parallels between the ‘modularization of the work system’ and the modularisation of computer systems. In particular, the parallels with the trend of Services Oriented Architecture (SOA). The slide below is taken from one of my standard decks on SOA. Change a few words and labels and the concepts mirror the Malone/Laubacher chart very closely.

SOA Trend

People Oriented Architecture – Components

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SOA Metamodel

Admittedly, the adapted definition of SOA is a pretty high level, but a number of SOA architects have determined a more in depth delineation of what SOA is all about and what it includes. A number of different vendors sometimes put forward their own versions and variations and so for simplicity sake I offer up the Wikipedia version with its helpful outline of key components…

· Service encapsulation – Many web services are consolidated to be used under the SOA. Often such services were not planned to be under SOA.

· Service loose coupling – Services maintain a relationship that minimizes dependencies and only requires that they maintain an awareness of each other

· Service contract – Services adhere to a communications agreement, as defined collectively by one or more service description documents

· Service abstraction – Beyond what is described in the service contract, services hide logic from the outside world

· Service reusability – Logic is divided into services with the intention of promoting reuse

· Service composability – Collections of services can be coordinated and assembled to form composite services

· Service autonomy – Services have control over the logic they encapsulate

· Service optimization – All else equal, high-quality services are generally considered preferable to low-quality ones

· Service discoverability – Services are designed to be outwardly descriptive so that they can be found and assessed via available discovery mechanisms

· Service Relevance – Functionality is presented at a granularity recognized by the user as a meaningful service

Going forward, Dynamic Work blog will look at each of these in turn as describe how the principles which are transforming the systems world can and are also being applied in the human world as well.

People Oriented Architecture – Definition

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Microsoft SOA

As I introduced in ‘Virtual Parallels,’ one of the intriguing developments inspiring my examination in ‘Dynamic Work’ is the parallels between increasingly flexible approaches to resourcing both knowledge work and computer work. In the latter realm of systems, the new approaches are often referenced under the rubric of ‘Services Oriented Architecture.’ The key word – ‘Services’ – refers to an approach to developing computer systems that moves away from monolithic programmes designed and built to do one thing or set of things, to an approach that is more based on a ‘federation’ of ‘components’ being assembled to build the capability required.

Many definitions of ‘SOA’ abound. Microsoft has its own resources on the topic that include a handy definition:

“SOA is a standards-based design approach to creating an integrated IT infrastructure capable of rapidly responding to changing business needs. SOA provides the principles and guidance to transform a company's existing array of heterogeneous, distributed, complex and inflexible IT resources into integrated, simplified and highly flexible resources that can be changed and composed to more directly support business goals.”

One could easily hijack that definition for a description of ‘Dynamic Work’

“Dynamic Work is a standards-based design approach to creating an integrated workplace infrastructure capable of rapidly responding to changing business needs. Dynamic Work provides the principles and guidance to transform a company's existing array of heterogeneous, distributed, complex and inflexible organisation and human resources into integrated, simplified and highly flexible resources that can be changed and composed to more directly support business goals.”

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Dynamic Licensing

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Microsoft Virtualisation Licensing

One of the big motivations for starting this blog on ‘Dynamic Work’ was my observations of the parallels between the changing nature of how computers are and can work (more flexible, more modular, more dynamic) and how humans do. While organisations can change the processes, architecture, operations, etc. of both their IT systems and their people systems, one of the considerations that often gets it the way are commercial restrictions. In the human world, a classic example of this is union rules which constrain changes in work practice. In the IT world, an equally prominent constraint can be licensing restrictions on the technology.

And licensing considerations do hit one of the biggest technology opportunities to make systems more versatile and ‘dynamic’ – Virtualization.  At the core, software companies have long struggled to figure out the most appropriate way to license their products. To buy just about anything, one needs a price per unit and then people decide how many units that they want to consume. In the world of software, it is hard to figure out what ‘unit’ to ‘count’. Companies have licensed by machine, by processor, by user, by transaction, by MIP, by hour and a whole host of other ways. Microsoft offers many of these alternatives in licensing its software (which makes for more choice, but adds frustrating complexity).

The new technology of ‘virtualisation’ introduces new challenges to how and what you ‘count’. The software doesn’t necessarily get ‘installed’ on a particular piece of hardware so you can’t count boxes. Furthermore, most licensing has some constraints on ‘moving’ the software (‘I’ll use this piece of software here for a little while and then when I am done, I hand it over to you to use for a while…’). These constraints can fly in the face of one of the great potential benefits of virtualisation which is dynamic load balancing that involves constantly moving software and workloads to systems best suited to handle them.

Microsoft has already pioneered what many analysts have praised as innovative and pro-customer licensing terms around virtualisation.  It started a few years ago when it announced that multiple instances of the OS would be allowed with each purchase.  But this past year, Microsoft extended the flexibility even further by (a) enabling application mobility for 41 Microsoft server applications under volume license agreements, and (b) Waiving the 90-day movement rule for eligible servers licensed under the Per Processor licensing model. This announcement is a big step forward for companies that want exploit virtualisation to dynamically manage a range of workloads with unprecedented versatility. 

Virtual Parallels

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Organisation Charts

Curiously, and perhaps not coincidentally, the same dynamics moving towards distributed working in the flesh-and-blood, bricks-and-mortar workplaces is also taking place in the bits-and-bytes of digital world.

One of the hottest concepts or trends in computing right now is ‘Service Oriented Architecture’ (SOA). At its heart, SOA is a collection of principles, guidelines and concepts (ie. the ‘architecture’ bit) that one needs to consider or adopt in order to exploit the flexibility that ‘service’ delivered software introduces. Traditional or conventional software implies a more centralised command-and-control structure where the computing is installed on the device where it is going to be consumed (sort of like a worker who is going to do work in the workplace where they are based) A ‘service’ orientation implies a results-delivery structure where the results of the computing are delivered to the user but the computing itself might be done on some computer where the use as not installed anything, the user just consumes the output of the computation.