Getting Agile

In a previous blog post I had mentioned documenting my process for analyzing the factors in business technology success. In that blog entry, I decided to first come up with a way to categorize the contexts and problem synopsis:

• Context – describe the situation
• Problem – describe the issue or issues to be resolved
• Questions to answer – a list of questions which may be valuable in finding a solution to the problem

I find this format valuable since it allows the questions that I would usually ask a client in terms of their business vision and technology choices to drive the solutions or “patterns”. This is how my own thought process works and therefore this format should be easy for me to work with.

I have derived some examples of this format for factors in vertical market technological success. Currently, I keep all of this documentation in my personal wiki which is not open to the outside world. I think that if I inandated viewers of my blog with too much detail I would just bore them more than I already do. So, I have truncated the attributes of each factor‘s attributes so as to not be too verbose. Here they are:

XML Standards

• ‘‘Context‘‘ – Many industries are creating consortiums and working groups to define standard definitions for their data.
• ‘‘Problem‘‘ – How does our industry decrease costs related to data integration between industry partners?
• ‘‘Questions to Answer‘‘ – Which standards to use such as legal xml, GJXDM, ebXML, UBL, etc.? Are standards for industry getting wide adoption? What part of the XML standards does our business need and what parts can be ignored from our point of view?

Existing B2B Interfaces

• ‘‘Context‘‘ – Most existing corporations already own a set of interfaces for business to business (B2B) transactions.
• ‘‘Problem‘‘ – Will the introduction of new partner interfaces be disruptive or costly in terms of existing partner interfaces?
• ‘‘Questions to Answer‘‘ – Should we rework all of our existing partner interfaces into web services? What are all of our existing partners migrating their business interfaces to? How mature are the technologies to upgrade into?

REST vs. SOAP

• ‘‘Context‘‘ – There are two widely competing messaging definition technologies for XML based services, REST and SOAP.
• ‘‘Problem‘‘ – Which XML message definition is better for our business needs?
• ‘‘Questions to Answer‘‘ – What do our partners currently use? Do we need any of the extra functionality which SOAP gives our business services?

Legal Regulations

• ‘‘Context‘‘ – Governmental, legal, and ethical regulations have become the norm for many businesses.
• ‘‘Problem‘‘ – How should our business apply regulatory compliance with the least amount of impact to the bottom line?
• ‘‘Questions to Answer‘‘ – What regulations must our company comply with? Are there applications, tools, and processes already out there which help with regulatory compliance for us?

Since this was my first test run of documenting the factors surrounding a technology strategy, I learned a few things. First, in order to correlate the context, problem, and questions to answer together I had to give it a title. So, already I have modified my initial format to:

• Title – a unique identifier for the context, problem, and questions to answer
• Context – describe the situation
• Problem – describe the issue or issues to be resolved
• Questions to answer – a list of questions which may be valuable in finding a solution to the problem

I am expecting that out of this will come some valuable understanding of previous pattern description formats and identify how much value I put into attributes of these patterns.