JP Morgenthal

On Thursday, September 10th, 2009, I moderated a panel at the 1105 Group’s Enterprise Architecture Conference in Washington, DC entitled, “SOA Goes Mainstream – An Industry and Government Roadmap.”  On the panel we had two Federal government agency representatives and two industry representatives, with one of the industry representatives providing a FedEx case study as the basis for their SOA experiences. As expected, each of the panelists’ SOA experiences was varied, with no two taking an identical approach.  However, the interesting tidbit of information I garnered from moderating this panel is that after a couple of years of effort, some approximation of a methodology that is termed “SOA”, which is specific to each organization, emerged and started delivering value ... (more)

The Reason Enterprise Architects Should Study Economics

Economics is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services and aims to explain how economies work and how economic agents interact. The really interesting thing about economics is that getting the right answer requires that you pose the right question. That is, if you choose to make conclusions based on casual observations of explicit... (more)

My Prediction of Cloud & SOA in 2005

Okay, maybe it's petty and I'm just tooting my own horn, but I found this old article I wrote for Upstream CIO's October issue (written in July '05).  In rereading this article today, I surprised myself how aware I was of the forthcoming Cloud & SOA convergence. The popularity of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is gaining ground on the heels of the success of eXtensible Mark-up Langua... (more)

What's the Best Definition of SOA?

It seems that I am not as flexible as I believed I could be on my thinking regarding SOA. I attempted to categorize various SOA engagements in my SOA World Magazine article entitled “A Classification Scheme for Defining SOA”. I believed that I could hide my dissatisfaction with the lack of clarity surrounding SOA by lumping SODA/application development into its own subcategory. I was wro... (more)

The Impact of Making Product Choices

As part of my job, I help customers to select the appropriate software to either fulfill a need or as a component of a larger solution.  Fulfilling this role means comparing similar software offerings and selecting the best fit.  The challenge in this goal is to map the vendor offering into a subjective requirement, such as “best fit”. Throughout my career I have acted in the role of cons... (more)