The new movie on the Eisenhower System of Enterprise IT i.e. ESB?
The Eisenhower System was envisioned as a systematic, incrementally adoptable plan for surface transport for the United States, which has been in build and operation for around 50 years. It acts as the fundamental artery of passenger and goods transport across United States.
When we study the history and operation of the Eisenhower System (a.k.a The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways | http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/reports/routefinder/), we will find many parallels to the information superhighway of the Enterprise, the Service Bus, such as
- Provided standardizations in naming, construction and operation, routing, governance (ownership, leadership, responsibility) and so on.
- Sequential signage to easily plan and navigate through the routes
- Had been lobbied for by major U.S. automobile manufacturers (as per Wikipedia)
- Made a dramatic changes to existing routes, neighborhoods and associated cities (as described in Divided Highways, http://www.skidmore.edu/academics/roads/index.html or as we watched in the pixar movie ‘Cars’)
- So many urban legends e.g. one out of every five miles of the Interstate Highway System must be built straight and flat so as to be usable by aircraft during times of war; this is not true.
When I find that the product vendors are pushing the enterprise IT for ESB adoption, where IT managers do not know what to do with existing message queue or EAI investments, it is very similar to the 50 years of the Eisenhower system. The current system owners are afraid that they would need to give away many of their exiting processing capabilities for cheaper sourced processing capabilities, interconnected through the super highway. Meanwhile, the architects are marching with their big SOA roadmaps and plans to construct new adapters, services and composites (=exits, entrances, interchanges, bridges and routes), where they debate and argue about the intricacies of service naming, bundling and so on. The enterprise governance officials (=bureaucrats, senators and congressmen) are deep in their discussion on funding, leadership, ownership and contracting, where there are many business driven exceptions (=one of the congressmen want to change the route to include his consistency).
So let me propose to all the SOA enthusiasts – Folks, we should study the 50 years of The Eisenhower System; it should be handy to build our new Service Bus driven IT enterprise Architecture.
Comments
Binooj, an excellent comparison. ESBs should form the foundation of scalable, flexible, and next generation business directed IT architecture. It can really help streamline the shared requirements across multiple integration requirements (conventionally handled by point to point mechanisms), an ESB is crucial to SOA, as outlined in the detailed analysis at the article "ESB:A bandwagon worth jumping on", accessible at http://www.infosys.com/research/publications/bandwagon-worth-jumping-on.pdf
However, key is to understand that role ESB in SOA is not in doubt, but key is to understand that SOA needs to be at the centre, and ESB should be an enabler, very rightly outlined in the treatise at http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/mia/?p=389
While looking at ESB deployment in SOA, we also need to be mindful of the standards issue, there being multiple ways of standardizing ESB constructions, as outlined in the article, Evaluating Enterprise Service Bus architectures, accessible at http://www.infosys.com/research/publications/toc-implementing-soa.asp
A further issue, is the need to understand problems of semantic interoperability in SOA and handle the semantic integration as part of ESB deployment, many of the approaches outlined in the article, Semantic interoperability for SOA, at http://www.infosys.com/research/publications/semantic-interoperability-soa.pdf
These are important desiderate while planning an SOA, with ESB playing a key role.
Posted by: Dr. Srinivas Padmanabhuni | June 15, 2008 08:25 AM