Motorola seeks big agility

Fascinating presentation by Motorola CIO Toby Redshaw at InfoWorld's recent SOA Executive Forum and Phil Windley has done a great job of capturing its essence: 

Key lessons learned:

• Start soon—its a long journey. Technology is not overly complex on the surface, but can be complicated to execute.
• This is a big change, so you need serious change management.

Redshaw also broke down the key SOA layers in an elegant fashion: 

• Data layer: legacy apps
• Integration layer: EII, EAI, etc.
• Business logic layer: Web services based business objects
• Orchestration layer: composite application and workflow, business process modeling and business activity monitoring (BAM). 
• Presentation layer: portals, Web apps, thick clients

Apparently, Motorola has introduced 180 services so far through its SOA framework and each BAM project (monitoring the linkages between enterprise software apps) has an average of 50 rules. As Windley reports it, Motorola is refining its SOA architecture with "maturing orchestration, nomenclature, and governance guidelines. They are creating an ROI model. They have an adoption strategy with guidelines and best practices."

"Motorola does $5 billion per year in online sales," states Windley. "One of the services they built was a credit card service that everyone in the company could use. Motorola also built things like a warranty service... Note that these aren’t Web applications, but Web services that people who build Web applications can use as building blocks."

As Redshaw put it, "Small agile kills big slow."  Leveraging SOA, his objective is to make Motorola big and agile.