Looking at the mirror one day I realised that I had reached the pinnacle of all learning. Knowledge hit me from all angles and I absorbed it, soaked it into my psyche with a passion. I had mastered the art of such complicated and diverse disciplines such as value driven engineering, expectation management, stakeholder management, time boxing and risk management with its kaleidoscope of red, amber and blues. I was ready to take on any corporate problem using my kitty of management tools, models and frameworks. Important words such as empowerment, swot analysis, exogenous influences, and diversification were oozing out of my 300 buck Brands branded grey suit and 30 buck tie from that shop which has ‘sale’ hardcoded on its mirror….. these important words always in a state of readiness to pounce upon and plonk themselves onto any conversation or PowerPoint slide they could lay their hands on. With the confidence of having Porter as a close relative, I looked at the reflection in the mirror and felt that I had finally arrived, in the corporate world…….
A wise person once said ‘it only takes a small needle to bust a bloated balloon’ (what a stupid quote, wise man, ya right!) Anyway, that wise person was probably referring to the rather sharp poke I got on my bloated confidence when an erudite and noble soul asked me to do a 5 slide presentation in 15 minutes to explain SOA to him as if explaining it to my mother.
SOA for my mother!! I immediately checked with Porter for a framework to crack this one and suddenly he was missing from the list of my next of kin. With trepidation I remembered the last time I had proudly announced our achievements on the Paradise Datamart to my mother she had equally enthusiastically asked me about which shopping mall. Encapsulation, orchestration, granularity, decoupling would equate to electrical wiring, music, wheat and marriage to my mother.
In that moment of anxiety as I scratched my brain for a simple way to explain SOA to someone with no IT knowledge, it dawned onto me that one of the true leadership challenges of corporate life was to explain increasingly complex situations and issues in increasingly simple ways, almost as if to your mother. After sweeping out all the models from my clouded head I could come up with only one example to explain SOA to my mother.
It relates to the kitchen. In the kitchen things are beautifully connected to each other - the sink to the dish washer, the gas to the cooker and disparate things such as refrigerator, kitchen sink, dishwasher, cooker, gas work together in harmony so that my mother can cook me a great meal. If however for some reason the dish washer breaks down we only need to remove it from the kitchen and not bring down the sink or indeed the entire kitchen to fix the dish washer. However sometimes we don’t build our applications like our kitchen, at least I didn’t. We end up connecting our dish washers with the sink in such a manner that if the washer has to be yanked out and used somewhere else, the entire sink has to be replaced.
So my mother’s kitchen is fully SOA compliant while some of the applications I built were unfortunately not so.
A wise person once said ‘it only takes a small needle to bust a bloated balloon’ (what a stupid quote, wise man, ya right!) Anyway, that wise person was probably referring to the rather sharp poke I got on my bloated confidence when an erudite and noble soul asked me to do a 5 slide presentation in 15 minutes to explain SOA to him as if explaining it to my mother.
SOA for my mother!! I immediately checked with Porter for a framework to crack this one and suddenly he was missing from the list of my next of kin. With trepidation I remembered the last time I had proudly announced our achievements on the Paradise Datamart to my mother she had equally enthusiastically asked me about which shopping mall. Encapsulation, orchestration, granularity, decoupling would equate to electrical wiring, music, wheat and marriage to my mother.
In that moment of anxiety as I scratched my brain for a simple way to explain SOA to someone with no IT knowledge, it dawned onto me that one of the true leadership challenges of corporate life was to explain increasingly complex situations and issues in increasingly simple ways, almost as if to your mother. After sweeping out all the models from my clouded head I could come up with only one example to explain SOA to my mother.
It relates to the kitchen. In the kitchen things are beautifully connected to each other - the sink to the dish washer, the gas to the cooker and disparate things such as refrigerator, kitchen sink, dishwasher, cooker, gas work together in harmony so that my mother can cook me a great meal. If however for some reason the dish washer breaks down we only need to remove it from the kitchen and not bring down the sink or indeed the entire kitchen to fix the dish washer. However sometimes we don’t build our applications like our kitchen, at least I didn’t. We end up connecting our dish washers with the sink in such a manner that if the washer has to be yanked out and used somewhere else, the entire sink has to be replaced.
So my mother’s kitchen is fully SOA compliant while some of the applications I built were unfortunately not so.
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