Interview Series: Four Questions With … Johan Hedberg

Q: In the near future you are switching companies and tasked with building up a BizTalk practice.  What are the most important initial activities for establishing such expertise from scratch?  How do you prioritize the tasks?

A: There is a couple that comes to mind. Some of them are catch-22. What comes first, the task or the consultant to perform the task? Generating business and balancing that with attracting and educating resources is core. Equally important will be to help adjust the baseline the company has today for the BizTalk platform – how we go about marketing, architecting and building our solutions and converting that from theory to BizTalk practice. The company I’m switching to (Enfo Zystems) already has a reputation of being expert integrators, but they are new to the Microsoft platform. So gaining visibility and credibility in that area is also high on the agenda. If I need to pick a first task I’d say that the internal goals are my top priority. Likely that will happen during a time where I will also have one or more customers (getting work is seldom the problem), which is why it must be prioritized to happen at all. As a consultant – customer assignments have a tendency to take over from internal tasks if you don’t stand fast.

Q: I recently participated in the European BizTalk Summit that you hosted and I am always impressed by the deep BizTalk expertise and awareness in your area of the world.  Why do you think that BizTalk has such a strong presence in Sweden and the surrounding countries? Does it have to do with the types of companies there,  Microsoft marketing/sales people who articulate the value proposition well, or something else?

A: I believe that we (Swedes) in general are a technology friendly and interested bunch and generally adopt new technology trends quite rapidly. Back in the day we were early with adopting things like mass availability of broadband connections and the web. At that time much of it was consumer targeted. I don’t think we adopted integration platforms in a broad sense very early. And those that did didn’t have BizTalk as an obvious first choice. Even though I wasn’t really in the business of integration five years ago I can’t remember it being a hot topic. That has picked up a lot lately. Sweden has also gotten out of the economic downturn reasonably good and finances still hold the possibility of investment within IT – especially for things that in themselves might add to cost savings. And there is a huge potential for that in companies all around Sweden where many still have the “spaghetti integration” scenario as their reality. Also, in the last couple of years, there has been an increased movement from other (more expensive) platforms to BizTalk as a first choice and even a replacer of existing technology. The technology interest is very much still there, and now to a much larger extent includes integration. And now the business is on it as well; a recent study among Swedish CIOs shows that integration today is considered a key enabler for both business and IT.

Q: In a pair of your recent blog posts, you mention the “it depends” aspect of BizTalk infrastructure sizing, as well as learning and leveraging the Azure cloud.  What are things in BizTalk (e.g. design, development, management) that you consider absolute “must do” and “it depends” doesn’t apply?

A: The last couple of years at Logica we’ve been delivering integration as a service and the experience from that is that there are two points of interaction that’s crucial to get right if you want to minimize trouble during development and subsequent release and support. They are both about communication, and to some smaller part about documentation. It starts with requirements. To ask the right questions, interpret the answers, document and agree upon what needs to be done. To have a contract. You still need to be aware of and flexible enough to handle change, but it needs to be clear that it is a change. It makes the customer/supplier relationship easier and more structured. The next checkpoint is that from integration development to the operations group that will subsequently support the solution in production. It’s equally important to give them what they need so that they can do a good job. In the end it’s the full lifecycle of the solution that decides whether the implementation was successful and not just the two days where actual development took place. I guess the message is that the processes around the development work is just as important, if not more so.

With development it’s easier to state do not’s than must do’s. Don’t do orchestrations if you don’t need them. Don’t tick all tracking checkboxes just because you might need them someday. Don’t do XmlDocument or intensive stream seek operations. Don’t say ok to handling 500mb xml messages in BizTalk without putting up a fight. If BizTalk serves as an integration platform – don’t implement business logic in BizTalk that belongs to the adjoining systems; don’t create an operations and management nightmare. Don’t reinvent solutions that already have samples available. Don’t be too smart, be simple. And it can go on and on… But it is what it is (right? 😉 )

Q [stupid question]: Google (or Bing) auto-complete gives an interesting (and frightening) look into the popular questions being asked of our search engines.  It’s amusing to ask the beginning of questions and see what comes back.  Give us a few fun auto-complete searches that worry or amuse you.

A: Since you mention Sweden as being a place you recognize as having a strong technical community let’s see what people in general want to know about what it’s like to be Swedish …

Food, medical aid, pirates and massage seems to be on top.

Also, since we both have sons, let’s see what we can find out about sons…

A fanatic bullying executioner who hates me. Not good.

But let’s move the focus back to me…

That pretty much sums it up I guess. No need to go any further.