Who let you change that?

So I find myself taking some time off from work this week. You know for "the Holidays" through New Year's Day 2010. I stroll outside my front door and see something attached to the door handle from the outside. Was it something from Santa? Or just a pesky promotion for me to buy something? Well, neither.

I just found out that my utility company that provides gas and electric services to my house, just installed a "Smart Meter". Now that sounds really exciting because I never really liked my "Dumb Meter" that I have had for 14 years. But wait a minute. I thought I was already enrolled in the "Smart AC" program. Oh! That was for putting intelligence into my Air Conditioner. This will make my entire gas and electric consumption "smarter"! How wonderful. I feel so intelligent now living in a Smart house.

While I am certainly all for embracing change to help be more smart about power/gas consumption and often am an early adopter of technology, I started thinking about the change incident itself.

- Who allowed the utility company to do this?
- If they installed a Smart Meter, they must have uninstalled the previous meter
- Was power interrupted during the swap?

I couldn't help thinking what if I was working from home and on an important conference call? My cordless phone connection, Instant Messaging session and Internet connection would have definitely dropped when the power was cut for a few seconds. I would have seen an actual "outage"!!

While I didn't feel the impact of this meter swapping, this reminded me of how IT often deals with change. In several enterprises that have embraced a service-based paradigm to achieve business agility through reuse and optimization of resources, a utility company installing a Smart Meter at a home is very similar to
- A new business service being installed into production
- A new version of an existing service being installed
- Deleting a service from an environment because no one is using it

Got services?
So that brings me to a big question for you. Do you know where your services are? What if you are tracking their use in a spreadsheet? ...

While several IT organizations manage this problem somewhat effectively by having elaborate change control processes and review boards, that approach is not foolproof and not scalable. Some IT organizations are smarter than that. They use a Service Registry to control and manage change.

A Service Registry contains information about services, such as the service definitions, interfaces, operations and parameters. These smart organizations start by registering information about services into a Service Registry. They can then get the visibility and change control they need when a new version of a service is registered or uploaded. So Service Registries are great.

Calm the chaos
With IBM's Service Registry, called WSRR, which stands from WebSphere Service Registry and Repository, you can even "auto-discover" services that may exist across your entire network on a variety of platforms such as .NET and JEE. That certainly helps with the initial setup phase.

So you maybe thinking that WSRR is just a slick catalog or a collection of service metadata, what's the big deal? Well, the big deal is that just like you capture information about services in WSRR, you can also create and manage policies in WSRR. It enables policy management across the lifecycle of a service. Policies can be attached or associated with one or more service, and then actually enforced during service development time as well as during runtime.

If you already have an idea of what WSRR is from a few years ago, I suggest you look again. The product has been transformed significantly in the last year. The latest version of WSRR, gives you ATOM feeds enabling Web 2.0 style interactions in a REST fashion. That means you can get notified about service related activity on your smart phone, favorite news reader, email or web dashboard. So during development time, someone could be notified that a new service definition is being created by a developer. To avoid service proliferation, the Enterprise Architecture team for example, could decide if reusing an existing service makes more sense.

What if you don't have services, but like to get the visibility and control for your MQ-based applications? Service enabled applications from WebSphere MQ and CICS can be published in WSRR enabling you to reuse, classify, describe, and govern these apps like any other service.

And WSRR is not just for IT users. Even business users can get useful information about services, because after all they are the ones who fund the IT infrastructure. WSRR V7 allows business users to track ROI of service investments, through simple browser widgets, that provide useful info graphically. Ofcourse, WSRR does much more than what I listed in this blog post. You can get more details here.

Outage?
So that brings me back to my meter-swapping concern. It turns out that the utility company had notified me about the meter change event but it was a month ago and by snail mail. If only I was alerted by email for me to click "approve" or a tweet or something...

And BTW, looks like there was an outage in my home. My kitchen clocks were blinking and needed to be reset.

Bit the bullet

I finally did it. Couldn't resist the temptation. Come on, the year 2010 is almost here. Now I can say "Yes. I blog". And maybe even say "never mind", if I am asked to explain myself.

Now, before I really blog, I better say that I am employed by IBM, and the postings on this blog are my own and do not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions. So there.

About the title of this blog, I live in a city called Walnut Creek in Northern California, near San Francisco. That's the reference to the creek.

Soon I plan to blog about integration technology and people. Stay tuned!