Fun in Omaha

Having a great time this morning at the Heartland Developer's Conference at the Qwest Center in Omaha Nebraska. Later today I'll be giving a session titled "Real SOA: Implementation and Best Practices" that discusses many of the topics found on this blog along with the experiences of the team over the almost 18 months since I came on board at Compassion as a Solutions Architect.

In short, the talk is broken into seven sections that highlight mostly what went right but also a little of what went wrong or things we could have done better. Those sections and the major point for each follow:

#1 Define a Services Platform
IT buy-in and support is critical

#2 Define Messaging and Schema Standards
It’s not just about coding standards

#3 Consider Cross Cutting Concerns
Build it for the long haul

#4 Consider Logging and Monitoring Up Front
Loosely coupled messaging is hard to tie together

#5 Build a Reference Model
Don’t jump in to business development

#6 Build a Reusable Framework
Budget time to help the rest of the organization

#7 Don’t forget business activity monitoring
Think about questions that will be asked at the end of the day