OutSystems announced the latest release of their 5.0 Agile platform last week.

Here’s the post from their blog regarding the release, its new features and some of the product details.

Give us a call to schedule a demo of the software or let us know if we can help you get a version downloaded and setup in your environment, at no cost!

From OutSystems.com:

In this version we’re taking agile a step further; not only are we supporting the entire application lifecycle management for web applications, we also added support for IT teams to rapidly develop business processes using agile methodologies.

Traditionally, business process development was done at a different pace using different tools than IT used for application development. However, one of the biggest challenges facing the business process world is the integration of business processes with applications; which meant one of them was always waiting for the other.  And, in the case of our customers who already use the Agile Platform, web application development was happening faster than business processes development.

With version 5.0 of the Agile Platform, we have closed that gap! Using the new Business Process Technology capabilities of the platform, IT teams can develop business processes totally integrated with web applications in an agile manner. All artifacts that the Agile Platform provides for Web Application development – like TrueChange technology, 1 Click-Publishing, Real Time Monitoring, and so on – are also available for business process development.

To develop this new capability, the OutSystems R&D team partnered with one of our customers, Van Ameyde, to design and implement this capability. Van Ameyde uses business processes intensively for insurance claims processing and has very heavy change demands for those processes. Customer participation has been key to the development of the new 5.0 functionality, and we believe that it led to a pragmatic implementation of Business Process Technology that will allow IT teams to fulfill the needs of the business from a process perspective, as fast as they have been doing for web applications with the Agile Platform.

Along with Business Process Technology, version 5.0 includes many other improvements that will make developers a lot more productive. If you’re already using the Agile Platform, check the videos of some of the improvements we made to the platform. If you want to give it a try for yourself, the best thing to do is download the (free) Community Edition and try out the new capabilities of the platform.

We stumbled upon an older article from a CRM publication this week that makes some points that remain key problems for the customer service industry.  Though the article was written in 2006, it’s shocking to realize how few businesses are focused on solving these issues and how few technology solutions have emerged with a focus on these kinds of problems.

After you read the article, give us a call, we believe Convergy’s Policy Management Suite is the perfect fit in businesses today where customers are getting mixed, contradictory, service prohibitory, messages…..

Here’s a great excerpt:

Stranger Than Fiction (This Stuff Really Happened)
An automotive company began to charge customers for loaner cars regardless of what car they had purchased, how old or new the vehicle was, or how many vehicles the customer had purchased. An insurance company cancelled a customer’s service for non-payment, and then solicited that customer the next day for a different product. A packaged goods company sent out empty boxes to customers who had purchased out-of-stock products and then sent the product later under separate cover. Each of these occurred as the outcome of separate silo objectives intersecting and falling in an awkward heap on customers’ laps.

This is the gift we give our customers every day. They receive the defaulted experiences that come together in a dimwitted chain of events that has the customer wondering “Do they talk to each other?” “What are they thinking?” and “Why do I have to take this anymore?”

**********************************

Five Ways to Keep Your Customers
What customers really want is simple, and that is for companies to keep their problems to themselves, and to provide a seamless experience to them when they call, contact, communicate, or go to buy something. To stop customers from running out your door, begin to do these things:

1. Eliminate the customer obstacle course. We deliver discontinuity in the experience where the organizational breaks exist. It is in these hand-offs that customer failures occur, in this customer Bermuda triangle that we’ve created. Simplify the road map for customers. Make it clear for them how they can do business with you in a way that’s actually beneficial to them.

2. Desilo your Web site. Our Web sites are often the cobbled together parts created separately by each company division. Figure out collectively how you will serve customers on your Web site and deliver an on-purpose brand experience.

3. FIX (really) the top-10 issues bugging customers. You can probably recite the biggest customer issues right now. Do something about them. Customers read the lack of action as lack of caring and certainly lack of respect. We all overthink what the customer effort should be. Start by striking these top-10 things from your corporate wide to-do list.

4. Help the front line to listen. It has been programmed to get a certain output. Sometimes this means closing the call within a time frame, and often it includes some kind of cross- or upsell goal. It may be to meet with a quota of customers in a certain time period. Let them be human, give them the skills for listening and understanding, and help the front line deliver to the customers based on their needs.

5. Deliver what you promise. The customers have to strong arm their way through the corporate maze just to get basic things accomplished. They’re exhausted from the wrestling match, they’re annoyed, and they’re telling everyone they know. And, oh by the way–when they get the chance, they’re walking.

You can read the full article here

Great post from OutSystems regarding the use of Agile and Scrum in the application development of Fly.com.

The post summarizes a recent webcast from Max Rayner the CTO of TravelZoo.

Travel Zoo is travel publisher with 18 million subscribers and fly.com is an online app that helps you find the exact match to your air travel needs. During the webcast Max discussed the problem space, their agile approach, the innovative metasearch engine, how they managed a distributed team, challenges, key learnings and reasons for their success.

At the core, we are often asked about using Agile in “real world” scenarios.  The thinking behind the question is likely based on the presumption that Agile works best for internal, low volume applications.  Its great to see TravelZoo and Fly.com see so much success with the approach and the software tool.

The full, original post is located here.

OutSystems recently posted the following bit regarding good sources of introductory information on Agile practices and Agile methodology.  We thought you would find useful:

In no particular order:

1. Jutta Eckstein’s book – Agile Development in the Large
2. Mitch Lacey & Associates – for their Blog + PDF Decks
3. Juergen Appelo’s blog “Noop.nl“
4. James Shore’s Blog “The Art of Agile“
5. Google Tech Talks: Elisabeth Hendrickson on Agile Testing
6. Craig Larman’s book “Agile & Iterative Development“
7. Dan North’s Blog “Introducing BDD“
8. James Bach’s resources (blog, book, pdf & articles) on Exploratory Testing
9. Last but not least,  Rodrigo Coutinho’s video on “The Secret of Agile Speed”

OutSystems, a provider of agile software development tools, announces a new, free Agile Platform Community Edition of its solution to give developers an easy way to create Web business applications and use agile techniques without any vendor lock-in.OutSystems, a provider of agile software development tools, has announced a new, free Agile Platform Community Edition of its solution to give developers an easy way to create Web business applications and use agile techniques without any vendor lock-in, the company said.

OutSystems said its Agile Platform Community Edition is a full version of the company’s Agile Platform that can be deployed into production for personal use or by small businesses with up to five concurrent end users. OutSystems announced its new release at the Agile 2009 Conference in Chicago on Aug. 24.

“The Agile Platform offers developers an end-to-end solution for the delivery of Web business applications that overcomes the development, delivery and change issues faced by enterprise IT shops when trying to apply agile methods,” said Mike Jones, vice president of marketing at OutSystems. “We anticipate that the Community Edition will lead to a grass roots growth in loyal users of the Agile Platform and eventually new customers.”

OutSystems’ Agile Platform is a unified solution, based on agile methodologies, that addresses the full life cycle of delivering and managing Web applications. It can be used to integrate existing systems, compose and automatically deploy new applications, manage them centrally and drive change during their entire life cycle, the company said.

The new Community Edition provides a small download footprint, a simple installation process, a getting started guide and sample applications. OutSystems also is making available a series of getting started tutorials to explore the Agile Platform’s capabilities for delivering rich Internet applications.

“OutSystems makes agile much easier, but it is important for developers to play around with the platform and discover it for themselves,” said Stefan Meier, associate director of software development at XDx, in a statement. “The Agile Platform Community Edition provides this opportunity, and we can’t wait for more developers to try it and build awareness of how software/IT staff and their business customers can benefit together from the improved communication process, time-savings and cost-effectiveness provided by the Agile Platform.”

In a blog post that supports the OutSystems strategy in releasing its Community Edition, Forrester Research analyst John Rymer said:

“Developers consistently tell us they want unrestricted platform downloads—no time bombs, no forced contacts with the vendor’s sales staff, no limited-function versions. … We thought in this era of open source, everyone understood this point about developer downloads. Downloads are a great way to encourage developers to learn your product’s ins, outs, values, and issues. But developers learn at their own pace, not on your schedule. Developers need your whole product because they will follow a variety of paths to knowledge, not just the paths that make sense to you. And developers don’t want to listen to a sales rep’s pitch on the wonders of your software. Let your code do the convincing instead.”

Agile development: Built to scale

By David Rubinstein

June 15, 2009 — The notion of agile development by now is well known for most every responsible CEO and CIO. With the economy stuck in low gear, organizations need to find ways to shorten development cycles and improve quality, all with the resources they already have on hand.

The Agile Manifesto, which spells out the ideas and practices for its implementation, was written in 2001, and in the eight ensuing years, many organizations have taken the first steps toward agile development. By now, many have had successful projects done by designated agile teams and have realized the cost savings and time-to-market benefits that agile espouses.

Now, these organizations want to reap bigger benefits by bringing agile out of its silos and into a wide deployment, across geographical locations, time zones and language barriers. Yet among the Manifesto’s 12 core principles are that “the most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation,” and “business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.” And there’s the one about “individuals and interactions over processes and tools.”

Those principles would almost seem to inhibit the adoption of agile processes in a large, distributed development organization. So how do organizations scale their agile practices to get a bigger payback?

Not to scale?
Robert Holler, CEO of agile project management software maker VersionOne, took a step back to answer that question. “There are challenges with scale. The problem’s not unique to agile or to software development,” he said. “Scaling is just tough. Sometimes agile gets a black eye for not scaling, but it’s more like, ‘Development doesn’t scale.’”

And Paul Hodgetts, lead consultant at Agile Logic, said that planning before embarking down the agile path is critical.

“There’s no way to get a big organization behind something like this without first thinking it through,” he said. “‘Why are we doing this? How will we get everyone on board?’ You must show them a way to get from point A to point B that won’t make their lives miserable for the next 12–18 months.”

Too often, he said, organizations fail and blame it on the methodology. “They say, ‘We tried to implement agile, but we didn’t plan or learn about it, so it didn’t work, so agile sucks.’”

Holler agreed that the foundation for agile must be built before adoption can be successful. Among the factors organizations need to assess are whether the educational base to scale already exists. If the answer is no, the organization must decide if it is willing to bring in the expertise. “If not, it’s an impediment,” he said.

“People say, ‘We want to scale but we don’t want to invest’ in education. That won’t work. [Education] is a fundamental tenet of success.”

Another fundamental issue for enterprise-wide agile development is buy-in. If you can’t get everyone in the organization to agree with the approach, success will be impossible to achieve, said Hodgetts.

“Agile is hard and it takes a lot of commitment,” he said. “Every enterprise implementation I’ve seen is a roller-coaster ride. They implement it in one team, see some productivity improvements, better quality software, and then that the people are happy. But when they try to bring it wider, they stir things up—maybe they move people off the successful teams to coach newer people—and they might actually lose productivity for a time.

“As an enterprise, you’ve got to be prepared to live through a number of cycles like that.”

In practical terms, though, scaling across a large, distributed organization poses several challenges. The tried-and-true methods of developing in pairs in the same room, and using a whiteboard at daily standup meetings, or even having those meetings, don’t carry over to teams that are geographically dispersed and working on an around-the-world, 24-hour schedule.

Enter the tools
The original 17 signers of the Agile Manifesto were mostly consultants and developers; as a result, the notion of small, co-located teams doing pair programming and constantly engaging the customer were top of mind. To go with this, a number of excellent point solutions were created for continuous integration, for functional and acceptance testing, and for managing change.

But these solutions optimize parts that can be leveraged by small teams, leaving organizations to do a lot of toolsmithing to integrate the pieces into an enterprise-scale solution, according to Scott Ambler, the practice leader for agile development at IBM.

“The overarching platform has to provide value for developers, or they won’t use it,” he said. “Continuous integration is great. Testing is great. But they’re having to do a lot of toolsmithing to make it work.”

On a management level, automated metrics offer tremendous value, he said. “Manual metrics is a lot of wasted effort. You need a coherent metrics program in place or you’ll have problems adopting agile in a meaningful way.”

IBM’s Rational Team Concert provides an integrated tool set for the agile life cycle, Ambler said. Rational Requirements Composer offers lightweight agile modeling; Quality Manager tackles usability and security issues while managing parallel testing efforts; AppScan—though not yet based on IBM’s Jazz technology—offers security testing for Web-based applications; and Software Analyzer is a static code analyzer that keeps agilists more focused on quality.

Ambler acknowledged there are “some great open-source tools” out there, but at the end of the day, “we see team after team spending so much time on integration. They should be developing applications for their own organization. Doing all this toolsmithing is not a great use of their time.”

Tools should not lock a user into a particular discipline, cautioned Ryan Martens, founder of agile project management software provider Rally Software. “It’s more about picking a partner that keeps you on the path” toward a mature agile process, he said. “Otherwise, you end up with a heavy process that’s not well lined up with agility.”

Rally’s software, simply called Rally, focuses on project planning and management, Martens said. The software integrates with development tools for Eclipse, .NET, scripting and embedded projects, he pointed out, and also lets organizations assess their agile prowess and bring in elements of coaching and training. “There are a lot of choices available at the development tool level. We don’t provide tools for individuals. Those pieces get integrated with our products,” he said.

Borland Software, which is the target of an acquisition by Micro Focus, transformed its in-house development to agile at the end of 2006. The company has development centers in Austria, Australia, Singapore and Santa Ana, Calif. To achieve its goal, the company created Borland TeamFocus, an electronic team board that enables project management.

“We built out team rooms and use projectors for virtual corkboards,” said Chuck Maples, senior vice president of research and development at Borland. “You can click on the corkboard and create tasks, and then drill into those tasks. It was all designed with an enterprise agile model in mind. It’s been very successful for us. We’ve improved quality, shortened our release cycles and increased the predictability to the business.”

VersionOne is also focused on project planning and management with its V1 software, and it now has Java and .NET SDKs to allow integrations with organizations using those technologies. In late May, the company announced V1 will include IdeaSpace, modeled after Salesforce.com’s IdeaExchange, for high-volume tactical planning, prioritization and collaboration, VersionOne’s Holler explained. “There’s nothing like an economic downturn to deliver some new functionality,” he quipped.

IdeaSpace, written by VersionOne to tightly tie in to its agile platform, is a place for the business side and developers to write stories and get feedback from customers. It supports multiple forums, with security, and lets managers see who’s generating the most requests and who’s responding the most, as well as other information for use in the planning cycle, Holler said.

OutSystems offers agile platforms for an on-premises development, delivery and operations management environment, and Agile Network as software-as-a-service for managing agile projects, including training and forums. Among the important features of the software is a sizing and scoping tool that leverages user stories to define the scope of a project, so an accurate budget can be generated, according to Mike Jones, vice president of marketing for OutSystems, which has more than half of its customers making changes to and building custom packages for SAP environments.

One of the keys to the OutSystems platform is the “true change engine” built into the platform’s model-based repository environment, which enables users to understand the impact of a change to the code and provides self-healing impact analysis; it either fixes a problem or reports on it. Further, Agile Network provides a place for end users to insert comments alongside a running application, and developers can launch the code underneath that submission screen to make the change, Jones briefly explained.

“End-user acceptance flies through because it’s been so vetted by that point,” he added.

To scale for the enterprise, Jones said OutSystems found it had to break some Scrum-type roles to leverage remote resources. “We split the traditional role of Scrum Master into an engagement manager, who’s always with the customer, understanding the feedback, setting expectations and leading the demo at the end of every sprint; and a delivery manager, who is where the development team is and who owns the architecture, the application, and who’s responsible to set the scope and deadlines,” he said. “The two managers work together to facilitate collaboration between the in-house and remote resources.”

Respecting the process
Even with tooling, Agile Logic’s Hodgetts said the agile advocates within large organizations get that it requires a change in their approach to development. “You can’t just purchase agile and install it and be done with it,” he said. “You can’t just buy VersionOne and say, ‘I’m agile,’ or hire Paul [Hodgetts] for three training sessions and say, ‘Now I’m agile.’”

There are some common themes that most agree are the first steps down the road to agile development: running in shorter cycles, higher visibility, and worker collaboration. “Getting those cores in place are critical to success,” Hodgetts said.

The question of scaling agile for enterprise-wide development is no longer a question, according to Rally’s Martens. “The question now is, how good do you want to be, by when, and who’s the best partner to get you there?”

Interesting article from American Banker regarding online account opening.

Obviously Waterfield Technologies has a number of offerings around online account opening and would love to talk with your business about how we can assist building a highly integrated, non-standard enrollment option for your organization.

Read the complete article here.

Online account opening is not exactly the frontier of innovation, but its potential as a low-cost engine for deposit growth underpins a new vision for the future of community and regional banks.

“It’s a cost center in and of itself and is almost a stand-alone branch without overhead,” says Stratton Huggins, a vice president of marketing at Renasant Bank, a $4 billion-asset institution in Tupelo, Miss.

Renasant generated $1 million of online account openings in five months starting in late 2008 after it outsourced the function to Goldleaf Financial Solutions Inc. The bank achieved this result with minimal call center staffing and no branch expansion. “It costs a lot less than the $25,000 per month it would cost us to open, provide staff and pay for one new brick-and-mortar branch,” Huggins says.

Smaller banks’ outsourcing of electronic account openings to Andera Inc., Metavante Technologies Inc., Goldleaf and others on a pay-per-transaction basis has thus far lagged the actual innovation. But in the middle-market and community bank segment economic pressures are making the kind of results enjoyed by Renasant a competitive must-have; open architectures make the technology more affordable for small banks.

“The push in this segment had traditionally been to increase fee income through online banking,” says Todd Shiver, the executive vice president of sales and marketing at Goldleaf in Atlanta. “But the banks realize they’re getting hits on their Web sites, so why not use that Web presence to let consumers in the door for new accounts and new deposits?”

Consumer adoption will also drive this trend. Javelin Strategy and Research says 45% of all consumers have tried to open a checking account online. Mark Schwanhausser, a research analyst for Javelin, says there has been some innovation in online account opening during the past year, but the larger trigger for small banks in the near future is an economy-driven need to curry favor with customers by allowing easy access to account openings while deemphasizing branches and call centers.

Market sources say about 600 implementations have taken place in a market of about 16,000 midsize and small financial institutions, including community banks, regional banks and credit unions..

“A paper-based account opening costs about $65 per account, whereas doing it electronically costs about 15 cents per account,” says Charlie Kroll, the chief executive officer of Andera, which has about 260 bank customers in the small to midtier segment.

Anticipating broader adoption in this segment, Andera recently reorganized its product line around levels of functionality and fees, rather than the more complex navigation menus it previously offered.

By letting funds be easily transferred from other internal or external accounts, banks can provide an additional, accessible financial management tool.

“Consumers want to save more in this current economy, and this gives them the opportunity to easily move funds into an account that they want to save,” says Matt Kennedy, the manager of alternative banking services for the $2.5 billion-asset Seacoast National Bank in Stuart, Fla. Seacoast did not disclose the account opening volume gained from outsourcing its online account opening to Metavante but did say the early results of a “soft launch” were impressive enough to prompt a full marketing effort for the initiative.

Susan Hawkins, the president of Metavante’s electronic banking solutions, says the use of open architecture allows integration between front- and back-end systems, permitting affordable straight-through processing. This also yields other benefits, including near real-time transactional capability and identity verifications in compliance with “know your customer” regulations.

“The new account is instantly opened without the consumer having to reapply online,” Hawkins says. “An existing bank customer is going to feel that their bank should already know them.”

Recently industry analysts, press, and bloggers have been writing about the state of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and whether it’s “dead” or in the “trough of disillusionment.”

These discussions have been fueled by surveys that suggest a decline in the number of organizations considering SOA, or that organizations have evaluated, but decided to shelve SOA for the time being. Or, even worse, that after an initial investment in implementing SOA architectures, organizations have been unable to capitalize on these investments.

So, what’s happening? What were these companies expecting and where did things go wrong? More importantly, can anything be done to put things back on track?

Let’s review the original promises of SOA and the most likely culprits in its perceived demise. And after all the doom and gloom, I’ll suggest how practitioners can revive their SOA dreams and turn them into a new and valuable reality by introducing Agile technologies as a part of your SOA development methodologies. We’ll call this Agile SOA.

The Promise of SOA
The promise of SOA is essentially the promise of agility for a company’s IT landscape as defined in three main categories:

1. Flexibility: By using SOA, technology reuse of legacy and existing systems in the enterprise becomes possible. The premise is that by using SOA you can create flexibility (agility) in systems at the front-end while reusing existing legacy systems at the back-end.
2. Productivity: SOA will enable higher productivity by helping companies react faster to changes in their business processes and providing the possibility of delivering new applications more rapidly by reusing existing code.
3. Expandability: SOA creates the possibility of new business applications while reusing existing systems and ensuring that the business value encompassed in these legacy systems is (re)used and expanded. SOA transforms point-to-point integrated environments into a more service-oriented architecture that in turn encourages scalability.

So, Where Did Things Go Wrong?
Early adopters embraced SOA practices and forged ahead toward implementation with the promise of flexibility, productivity, and expandability as their goal. However, many of these companies failed in delivering on SOA and value to the business.

So, let’s examine what might have gone wrong with some of these SOA projects. Here are the top four likely culprits:

1. Misconceptions About SOA
Ask a question and you’re likely to get several different answers to “What is SOA?” According to one very broad definition:

A service-oriented srchitecture is essentially a collection of stateless services. These services communicate with each other. The communication can involve either simple data passing or it could involve two or more services coordinating some activity. Some means of connecting services to each other is needed.

However, some people only think of a Web Service (WSDL) when thinking of SOA, and because of this misconception, there can be a lot of stuff considered “SOA-enabled.” Others believe that implementing an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) brings you to a SOA state. And then there are the software vendors proclaiming their products to be SOA-ready, which typically means they’ve exposed some Web Services. However, these are often too fine-grained to be called services and are delivered as one size fits most to satisfy the general marketplace. These services are usually more oriented to building the technology infrastructure and, initially, don’t deliver any new functionality to the business.

Organizations that purchase SOA-ready products must build a specific layer on top of the product’s technology to make it align with their company – without doing this, the chances of the SOA project failing are high.

2. Lack of Business Commitment
Most SOA projects are driven by someone in the IT department. The CIO, enterprise architect, or IT manager believes that SOA might be a solution to their ever-present problems – slow delivery; ever-increasing project backlog; or enhancement requests to legacy applications. This person directs the developers to build applications based on SOA principles. The problem with this is that there’s typically a lack of commitment from the business. SOA isn’t a technology that can be introduced without visibility to the end user. SOA requires commitment from the business because it touches many different systems across multiple departments.

If any part of the business fails to sign up to the SOA way of thinking, the chain is broken and, once again, SOA fails to live up to its promise.

3. Lack of Funding
Starting a SOA project can be a costly exercise. First, there’s the cost of technology. You’ll need a platform with which to build your services, security, wrappers for existing systems, etc. Then, there’s the cost of expertise and initial SOA projects that typically equate to steep learning curves and require high levels of commitment. This can be done by hiring experienced people or a consulting partner. Either way, you have to include this in your budget.

Remember, the first project is usually the project that puts the SOA architecture and its technologies in place; it doesn’t deliver the promised business application services. Getting funding for projects with a high business value is difficult at the best of times – and getting funding without immediate return is almost impossible in today’s economy.

Implementing SOA without the appropriate budget or support from the business for the expenditure is another cause of failure.

4. Project Execution
Most SOA projects are managed and executed using Waterfall-style project methods. This means defining a project whose duration is from nine-12 months in which the whole SOA infrastructure is defined, coded, and in the end implemented.

This top-down approach to implementing SOA delivers neither immediate value nor working business applications for two reasons. One, there’s little end-user involvement, which increases the risk of failing to meet the true business needs of IT or the business. And, this approach doesn’t take into account that the world, and the requirements, usually change over time. It’s a common misconception that when all required services are defined upfront that the need for change will be minimal. This misconception existed for object orientation and is equally true for SOA.

Services will change, so the technologies used for a SOA implementation must be flexible and support change. If the architecture used to implement SOA is not agile enough and inflexible SOA will fail.

Can These Issues Be Resolved?
How do we solve these issues and get SOA users to climb the path to enlightenment? How do we get commitment from the business, free up funding, and make sure we have a flexible SOA that speeds up application delivery times?

The focus needs to shift away from issues of implementing a new technology architecture to delivering tangible benefits to the business for every project, namely:

• Improving alignment with the business
• Accelerating time-to-market of business applications
• Reducing the cost of building and managing business applications
• Providing flexibility to respond better to changing business requirements
• Reducing project backlogs

The answer is introducing Agile technologies as a part of your SOA development methodologies; we call this Agile SOA. Agile SOA is the bottom-up approach to SOA development.

Now, it may seem a bit strange since SOA architecture is widely seen as something that doesn’t really fit well with an Agile approach. After all, the common perception of Agile is that it works best when there are lots of fuzzy requirements and user interaction. A SOA implementation seems to be just the opposite, it’s definitive in its requirements and IT is usually the sole sponsor. In addition, there’s a widespread perception that taking a bottom-up approach to a SOA project isn’t practical.

Through our interactions with customers, OutSystems found that these perceptions are easily avoided. Based on our experience, success starts with setting the appropriate strategy for the SOA project:

1. Do not buy a product to SOA-enable your business. Every company has its own specific processes that need to be defined as services in their unique way.
2. Make sure that your base architecture will let you define services that aren’t too fine-grained.
3. Spend time to find the right technology to support your ever-changing environment.

Once the technology and architecture are determined, the next most important issue is getting business commitment.

This means demystifying SOA for the business and transforming SOA from a technology into a business benefit. This can be achieved by keeping in mind two key points:

1. Perceived business value is high when real-world issues are solved. So, find a project that will solve a real business issue and contribute to a part of the SOA infrastructure layer. Try to find a project from the backlog that needs to (re)use data and business logic from existing systems.
2. Make sure the project can be delivered less than three months. This limits the budget risks for the user and ensures the business won’t change too much during project execution. Plus it sets you up to run additional short-lived projects that can begin to leverage and reuse existing services. The business will rapidly see an improvement in time to delivery and perceive benefit from this thing called SOA!

All these things will help you get commitment and funding from the business and enable you to get started on implementing a solid SOA architecture.

There’s one last thing.

To ensure that what you deliver provides the necessary functionality and is accepted without organizational blockage – you must involve the end user in the project. Then, and only then, are you doing Agile SOA!

Agile SOA will help you get commitment from the business, help you fund the project, and reduce the risk of failure. Agile SOA especially helps you realize the advantages of a SOA infrastructure when budgets are tight, while at the same time delivering business value. With an Agile SOA approach you’ll avoid the troughs of disillusionment or the death of SOA and ascend straight up the slope of enlightenment with a successful SOA implementation.