Mike Kavis Spills the Beans on SOA and More

Today we had a conversation with Mike Kavis, chief architect at Catalina Marketing and author of the blog Enterprise Initiatives. His blog focuses not only on enterprise architecture, but on portfolio management, change management and business process management.

Mike has over 22 years of experience in applications development and has worked in the health, retail, manufacturing, and loyalty marketing industries. He has worked on some of the largest databases in the world and has a broad range of experience from mainframes, client server, embedded systems, linux clusters, data warehouse, business intelligence, enterprise portals, financial applications, BPM, and SOA to name a few.

StackSafe: Tell us about yourself. How did you become focused on IT Operations?

Mike Kavis: I am the chief architect at Catalina Marketing. My focus is primarily on enterprise architecture. From the operations standpoint, I am focused on the run-time governance aspects of SOA. It is critical to monitor the health of our customer facing systems and monitor and measure our service policies and SLAs.

StackSafe: What is the biggest challenge to SOA success today?

Mike Kavis: The biggest challenge today is not the technology, it is the people. In our case, we are implementing both BPM and SOA. This brings a large amount of culture change both on the business and technology side. Organizational change management is the number one challenge that I am faced with on a daily basis. Technology problems can always be solved by leveraging the right technical resources, but getting people everyone on board with why change is needed, what the change means to them, and how the company will benefit if they change can be challenging. Don’t underestimate the impacts of resistance to change. It can undermine any project.

StackSafe: How well do you think virtualization is being employed by companies today? Do you see any problems with virtualization ahead?

Mike Kavis: Virtualization is being deployed with the goal of reducing power and simplifying server management. Most companies that I am familiar with are doing a decent job of implementing virtualization. My company has consolidated well over 100 servers onto a clustered VM environment which has helped reduced costs and made life much easier for the administrators.

One issue I see with virtualization is many applications like our BPM tool and our ESB, require very specific VM settings. Vendors do not seem to be publishing the optimal settings and companies are left performing trial and error exercises to optimally configure each virtual machine. When issues occur, there can be a tendency for vendors to start pointing fingers at each other.

StackSafe: You have mentioned that underestimating or ignoring impact of change is a leading reason why enterprise initiatives fail. How can companies better understand the impacts of change?

Mike Kavis: I highly recommend assigning a full time person to the role of organizational change management. The cost of this resource will pay for itself over and over. We tried to tackle it from a steering committee approach, but we all had our plates full of various other critical tasks. The first step towards understanding the impacts of change is to perform a readiness assessment. This needs to be done from a business, technology, customer viewpoint. Once this assessment has been performed, a strategy must be put in place to deal with the areas where the impacts of change are the greatest. The tasks associated with change must be managed in the project plan along with the tasks for developing and deploying the solution.

StackSafe: What do you view as the biggest threat to availability for IT operations teams?

Mike Kavis: Complexity. As more companies attempt to implement SOA, the complexity of today’s production environments increases substantially. This is a tradeoff. With SOA, we are giving the business the ultimate flexibility and increased speed to market. By making things simpler for our customers, we create a huge management challenge on the backend for IT. SOA gives us a distributed, heterogeneous environment that can quickly get out of control if it is not properly governed. This requires new skills in operations and many new tools required to monitor and manage this complex environment. There are so many points of failure in this time of architecture that availability can be extremely challenging if you don’t establish a robust run-time governance strategy.

StackSafe: What is your opinion of the alignment between developers and IT operations with regards to improvements to business applications?

Mike Kavis: In my 22+ years in IT, I have always seen these two groups act as two separate silos with different priorities. Operations tend to rank manageability as the highest priority which can lead to the wrong solution for the business applications team. In my world, operations tends to shy aware from tools such as wireless access, instant messaging, and many other tools that their customers are screaming for. At the end of the day operations needs to balance standards and security with customer needs and productivity. I believe the answer is to embed operations people in business application projects from the start so that the operations people can get a better understanding of the business requirements and form better relationships with the development staff.

StackSafe: If a company could focus on one area to improve uptime and availability, where would you recommend they begin?

Mike Kavis: I believe it starts with architecture. Too often solutions are not architected properly or are built with no regards to the existing infrastructure. I feel that IT spends a lot of time addressing the symptoms but ignoring the root cause. This is especially true as we move into an era where integration and service orientation is becoming critical to the business. As our environments become more complex, we should invest more time and effort up front in our projects so we spend less money in the long run keeping the wheels on the bus.

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Filed Under: Change Impact Analysis, Change Management, Downtime, IT Operations, Interviews, Interviews-Bloggers, Virtualization