Day 1 at IEEE SCC 2008 Conference...
This workshop followed a unique model of each paper having a discussant. This, in fact, kicked off some interesting discussions. One which interested me was around the topic of goal mapping to existing services. The author had presented an approach (BGSC Graph) to match services closely to requirement while discovering them. However, my understanding was that author had made an assumption of having a service portfolio but hadn't considered the origin of service. It has been our experience that service created within organizations today still lack the rigor of having gone through the top down approach (starting with what the business wants). This would mean it would be difficult for breaking up the business goals and matching with objectives with which services were created. However, on another note, I feel this would be useful if the services are being sourced from partners. Today we have Amazons and SAPs offering out of the box services and this method (BGSC Graph) can help in evaluating them.
There were a few other discussions around verification of correctness of contracts, an architectural model for SOA and modeling virtual enterprises. Interestingly though not in earlier program, there was a key note from Dr. Banavar, Director of IBM India research lab. Following the key note discussion loomed around what would the future and according to Dr. Banavar, it was Services Engineering. "Disciplined Service Engineering can help the world economies to systematize service development, and focus on service innovation" to quote from the presentation was the compelling factor and the necessity for the services community to investigate. He brought out two immediate areas to make service engineering possible. Firstly, was similar to industrialization ie., large scale development using distributed collaboration across the world and secondly the technology aspect - a new way called variation-oriented engineering. The discussion ended with the note that we the research community in services computing have to raise to address the challenges of the future, which will come as Services Engineering.
Will continute to post some interesting discussion at conference...
