Mike Walker's Blog: Gartner 2010 Hype Cycle for Enterprise Architecture

 

Gartner 2010 Hype Cycle for Enterprise Architecture

Recently Gartner released the 2010 Hype Cycle for Enterprise Architecture (EA).  It's an interesting report. I'm not sure if there are really any surprises here but it worth looking at the macro themes of the report.

You can find additional resources here:

• Full Article: http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=clientFriendlyUrl&id=1402513 
• Press Release: http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1417513

Source: Gartner July 2010

What the report reveals is a set of macro themes for Enterprise Architecture.

• Traditional Enterprise Architecture that is technology focused and driven has become mainstream.
• A fundamental shift in the architecture community from IT Architecture to true Enterprise Architecture where Business Architecture is a first class citizen. EA is past the hype of the standard lip service of "We align IT with Business" and we are actually doing it. 
• Business focused EA that is executed through Enterprise Business Architecture (EBA), Business Process Management (BPM), Capability analysis and modeling, and EA Performance Management
• Frameworks are not as mature as they could be. This capability for EA is estimated by Gartner to be 10+ years out until productivity is realized. As you have heard from me in past posts and articles, I believe there is a level of pragmatism that is lost on the EA Tool providers. If they nail that, they will shorten that time to productivity significantly. 
• While there is mainstream adoption of Enterprise Architecture, the maturity level is still low. This is shown in the Hype Cycle survey it stated that 73% of EA organizations aspire to be "mature". Does this mean that those 73% are not mature?

Gartner has published the following abstract to the EA Hype Cycle

"The artificial walls between business and IT are crashing down, and EA is the bridge to integrate business and IT," said Philip Allega, Research Vice President, Gartner. "EA's original promise was its ability to provide future safe guidance given the desires and vision of an organisation's senior leadership team. As IT roles shift away from technology management to enterprise management, EA is suited to bring clarity to these blurred boundaries, and, by 2015, increased adoption of EA processes and uses by business will further IT's alignment with the organisation's culture, future-state vision and delivery of business value outcomes."

Early-generation EA, situated on the right side of the Hype Cycle, is marked by long-standing and well-practiced approaches such as enterprise technology architecture (ETA) and architecture assurance that have been supported by traditional and federated approaches to EA. While these practices help to direct tactical IT operations, they are often supported without a business future-state vision and, as such, limit the ability for organisations to achieve and demonstrate significant business value.

"Overall, EA slipped into the Trough of Disillusionment, along with EA tools, because EA practitioners couldn't or wouldn't push EA efforts to become integrated with the business, drawing an invisible wall between the business and IT," said Allega.

As EA practitioners have become more business-focused and organisations have become more hyperconnected, new approaches of managed diversity and middle-out have emerged on the Trigger slope, forming the latest generation of EA. These disciplines are employed by end-users to try to integrate and engage with the business as a partner. One of the emerging disciplines includes a middle-out EA approach, which according to Gartner will have a transformational impact on business in the next two to five years.

"The middle-out approach enables the creation of an adaptable architecture that can help manage rapid change and enable innovation by focusing on coordination through interfaces, rather than on control through top-down standards," said Allega.

Gartner found that 73 percent of clients aspired to support "mature enterprise architecture" during the next three to five years, demonstrating that business strategy will be pervasively understood and supported within EA and across business and IT. "We predict that by 2015, the marketplace of EA practitioners will find a landscape very different from today's environment," said Betsy Burton, Research Vice President and Distinguished Analyst, Gartner.

"To prepare for 2015, EA practitioners need to ensure that EA practices are driven by a clear business vision and defined business context, and that their EA program has stabilised the practices and disciplines that are less than two years to mainstream adoption."

Mike Walker's Blog: Gartner 2010 Hype Cycle for Enterprise Architecture

48 best free software downloads from Microsoft | News | TechRadar UK

 

48 best free software downloads from Microsoft | News | TechRadar UK

An Introduction to User-Centric Enterprise Architecture

An Introduction to User-Centric Enterprise Architecture

Interesting Article I came accross when looking for what others are doing in this space.

Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for Back-End Application Integration Projects

Looks like Microsoft BizTalk has finally made it into the leader quadrant; and leads by a hefty margin as well. What is interesting the Gartner commentary on the  vendors who were dropped as it certaily reflects consolidation in the market as smaller players were acquired by bigger ones.

BEA Systems: The company was acquired on 1 July 2008 by Oracle (see "Oracle's Post-BEA Middleware Road Map: Product Recommendations for Users").

Cape Clear Software: The company was acquired in February 2008 by Workday, a company offering HR applications through a SaaS model. Cape Clear's middleware technology is used by Workday in the context of its SaaS offering, but it is not sold anymore to user organizations (see "Workday Buys ESB Vendor to Offer Integration as a Service").

Iona Technologies: The company was acquired in July 2008 by Progress Software. Iona's middleware technology (Artix and Fuse) is in the process of being integrated into Progress' product lines (see "Progress Acquires Iona to Strengthen Presence in AIM Market").

PolarLake: The company refocused its strategy around offering specific integration solutions for the financial services market.

WebMethods: The company was acquired in June 2007 by Software AG. Software AG retained webMethods' products and branding.

Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for Back-End Application Integration Projects

The Rise of the Machines - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Contributor - The Rise of the Machines - NYTimes.com: "Somehow the genius quants — the best and brightest geeks Wall Street firms could buy — fed $1 trillion in subprime mortgage debt into their supercomputers, added some derivatives, massaged the arrangements with computer algorithms and — poof! — created $62 trillion in imaginary wealth. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that all of that imaginary wealth is locked up somewhere inside the computers, and that we humans, led by the silverback males of the financial world, Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson, are frantically beseeching the monolith for answers. Or maybe we are lost in space, with Dave the astronaut pleading, “Open the bank vault doors, Hal.”

As the current financial crisis spreads (like a computer virus) on the earth’s nervous system (the Internet), it’s worth asking if we have somehow managed to colossally outsmart ourselves using computers. After all, the Wall Street titans loved swaps and derivatives because they were totally unregulated by humans. That left nobody but the machines in charge."

Could we be the victim of another software gone horribly wrong....

Business Process Modelling Tool Selection

Ever struggled to come up with requirements when doing process modelling tool selection? Sometime back I put together a mind map showing all the criterions I would consider when doing so. You can access the map at this URL: http://www.mindomo.com/view?m=197f252e5a3e39290c55a0c81cafbe4c

Who is interested in What..

Recently I was looking at the stats for this blog from 23rd January to 22nd February and looks like most people are interested in SOA and a post where I was venting my frustration on WSE & MTOM has hit a sweet spot (must be a common problem).

Scenario Planning

Interestingly the very day I blogged about lack of skills when it comes to Financial Modelling, Chris Potts over at CIO.com blogged about the importance of Scenario Planning; for those who are interested following are the links to that post.

http://advice.cio.com/chris_potts/enterprise_architect_scenario_planner

http://cloudcomputing.blogspot.com/2008/02/scenario-based-enterprise-architecture.html

What language does your business speak?

In my work often I am asked to go in and setup Enterprise Architecture within organisation or help existing Architecture function. The sponsors of these projects tend to be CIO or Managers of Strategy and Architecture. In most of these engagements over past few years I have seen a consistent message being repeated over and over again.  "We need Enterprise Architecture and there is no need for you to speak to the business while developing one." Some time they may have a sound reason; such as they have done lots of workshops with business already and don't want to repeat it or they have Business Process Improvement team in place who can supply most of the information.

It is when they make statements like "We can tell you all you need to know about the business; as our operational/business people don't know what they are doing" or words to that effect.  It does surprise me in this day and age when most CIO's priority is greater Business to IT alignment they or their direct report can practice such disdain for a part of the organisation they are supposed to serve.

In my opinion some of this arrogance can be attributed to lack of common communication language and view point. Let me explain viewpoint before I delve into language issues.

IT like finance, human resources and other shared services interact with the entire organisation (wide viewpoint) rather than a department at a time. Business people working within a department want what is best for their department (narrow viewpoint). While shared services people who interact with multiple departments see the duplication of effort going on and feel frustrated by in-efficiency. All this can be eliminated by proper governance and management structure, the key here is trying to educate an average business user that their organisation is system with inter-connected parts. Now to the language question.

Most IT people like to live in a world of jargons, in which they find great comfort as it to some extent provides them with sense of belonging. IT is not alone in this sin; Defense Forces take great pride in conjuring up acronyms the length of a sentence that no sane person can ever hope to interpret. To some respect it is their way of weeding out anyone "not in the know" out of the conversation. IT Departments practice the same art quite effectively in confusing and bamboozling their business counterparts. Business on their part have held technology at an arm’s length and tolerated it as a necessary evil. There is rising awareness among business leaders on the strategic importance of IT and the impact it can have if used properly on bottom line growth.

Business deals in language of numbers; business scenario planning which then leads to business strategy is based on financial models. These complex financial models tend to answer questions like "should we expand into Asia what will be the impact on product development, sales staff and so on..". IT on the other hand tends to more visual and use complex diagrams (network diagrams, use cases diagrams, component diagrams..) to communicate their message. When most business people look at these diagrams they can’t comprehend how what the IT people are showing them will impact their bottom line growth or top line growth. The only way out of this debacle is for IT to understand and have the ability to present their models in numbers. Match IT investment decisions to organisations internal rate of return and so on.

Un-fortunately this trend has yet to catch-on, at least in Australia I see job adds for Enterprise Architects which calls out for experience in Microsoft .NET, Java, SAN technologies or MPLS networking. Never ever ask for the ability to read balance sheet or retain the ability to do financial modeling to match IT investment program to organisational investment parameters (it will be too much to expect business to learn IT's visual communication techniques as they are the clients IT is expected to serve). Till such time we will always have some form of divide between business and IT. I would like to close by saying there is a little ray of sunshine out there. Sometime back while speaking at BTELL conference I met Chris Pots who calls himself IT investment strategist rather than an Enterprise Architect, he shares some of the views expressed above.

Being Inspired

Sometime back one of my ex-colleagues Arjan Dewan recommended a book titled "Inspiration" by Dr. Wayne W. Dyer. I not a great fan of self help books, hence approached the book with some trepidation.  Reading the book I came across following passage from an ancient Vedantic text by Patanjali penned around 2000 years back; it describes is almost the same as what most programmers experience as being in the zone.

"When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds, your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be." 

I have experienced this feeling sometime back, waiting to be inspired again..................

SOA Security

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has released a 128-page guide to help organizations understand the security challenges of Web services in service-oriented architecture. Download link http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-95/SP800-95.pdf

Issues addressed in the publication include:

• Confidentiality and integrity of data transmitted via Web services protocols.
• Functional integrity of the Web services requiring the establishment of trust between services.
• Availability in the face of denial-of-service attacks that exploit vulnerabilities unique to Web service technologies.

Web site dedicated to Service Oriented Security http://www.service-orientedsecurity.com/

California Enterprise Architecture Program issues SOA Security White Paper http://www.cio.ca.gov/caIT/pdf/SOA_Security_White_Paper.pdf

Free SOA Security E-Book http://www.team509.com/download/docs/security/hacking/McGraw.Hill.Osborne.Media.XML.Security.eBook-TLFeBOOK.pdf

BPM and Security from James McGovern http://duckdown.blogspot.com/2006/12/thoughts-on-bpm-and-security.html

Colin White on SOA Security and reuse http://colin.trematon.com/enterprise-business/soa-security-and-enterprise-reuse/

Most of these are courtesy of Garry E. Smith

Unifying Process Framework

The UPF is a business framework that is generic to businesses and applies across all sectors commercial and public. It is naturally used by IT where it is part of a business, or by IT if it operates in a market where it is servicing a number of businesses on a commercial basis.

http://www.bita-center.com/upf2

Article 1 - 'The IT Management Status Quo and 5 Year Challenge'
Article 2 - 'Concepts of a Unified Framework and Mapping Existing IT Frameworks'
Article 3 - 'Mapping IT Governance and the IT Value Chain onto a Unified Framework'
Article 4 - 'End to End Service Management: A Case Study'

Article 5 - 'The UPF Support Dimension'
Article 6 - 'The UPF Enabling Dimension'

Article 7 - 'UPF 'The Way Forward''

Business Model or Operating Model

Recently on one of EA online discussions the concept of Business Model vs Operating Model was explored. I just wanted to use this post as a way to summaries the thinking for my own use.

Chris Potts view on components of operating model

•  Key operational performance ratio(s) - usually only one or two primary ones from which everything else cascades
• Core financial structure - P&L, new investments and cash flow
• Distribution of accountabilities and competencies - e.g. product versus geography
• Organisation - capability areas, not actual roles
• Processes and knowledge (as one composite framework, not two separate ones)
  Systems and technologies

Following reasons why an Organisation might want to invest in Operating Model.

•  To provide input to their plans for investing in change
• To help figure out why their current operations are underperforming
• To decide how best to integrate a new acquisition
• If a company is planning to change its business model, to compare current and intended operating models and expose the impacts and costs of the change 
• When the company is scenario planning its business model, to explore the operating impacts of different scenarios and therefore help assess their relative merits

There are some schools of thought out there to define the Business Model as a construct following are links to some of them.

• OMG's Business Motivation Model
• http://www.businessrulesgroup.org/home-brg.shtml

If you take a Value Chain or Process Viewpoint following links might help.

• http://www.sap.com/solutions/businessmaps/c-businessmaps/index.epx
• http://www.apqc.org

There is a Business Model Design template from Arvetica that is helpful when starting the journey.

 

The only challenge with this model is it does not give a lot of weight to Market Architecture which is Chris Potts speciality and I am eager to find out :-)

MIT Sloan has published some material on Business Models and they describe the same as "what a company does and how they make money from doing it". They then classify it using 16 Archetypes more info here http://process.mit.edu/Info/eModels.asp the concept can be downloaded from the following location working paper.

Lets not forget the book "Enterprise Architecture as Strategy" which started the whole discussion. It defines the business model as following types.

•  Replication - Few shared customers with highly variable product design. Example is a holding company that has a set of companies in related businesses. An example might be a company that owns auto dealerships, auto financing, and auto parts stores.
• Coordination -  Shared customers with highly customized products, services, and features. A wealth management firm is a good example. They sell a set of services such as financial planning, insurance, and estate planning. Each of those services is provided by different companies but there is a high degree of sharing customer information. The services are coordinated by a single representative.
• Replication - Few shared customers with operationally similar product units. This is the franchise model. (McDonalds)
• Unification - Consistent product design and globally integrated processes for all customers. (Dow Chemical Example)

Web Services Security and Federated Identity Authentication

Sometime back [circa 2004] I had written a paper on the above topic the link is attached. It is more for my benefit than anyone else, such that I can find the file quickly :-). Any comments welcome.

Web service security

Business Architecture Kick Start

Ever wanted to get a quick overview of business functions in an organisation SAP have done a great job with their Business Maps; worth checking out http://www.sap.com/solutions/businessmaps/index.epx

Service Oriented Network Architecture (SONA)

Not that we did not have enough acronyms to confuse us CISCO goes ahead and creates another one. I was doing some background research on an article published by the CIO magazine "The Rise of Service-Oriented IT and the Birth of Infrastructure as a Service", when I came across SONA. Quick search on CISCO website showed standard marketing hype and nothing more CISCO SONA Stuff . What I was looking for was some sort of reference architecture on how CISCO saw all this working. I like the concept just that so far it appears like a half baked stuff created by marketing.

From a concept point of view if the network can become application aware, for example in a branch office if the link goes down the network can cache till head office comeback on line and things like that will be a big boost for SOA as application then don't have to worry about implementation of reliable messaging and so on.

If anyone has more info on SONA or Infrastructure as a Service I would be really happy to hear it.

Business Process Architecture and SOA

Recently I had the pleasure of presenting at the BTELL Conference on Business Process Management on the topic of Business Process Architecture and SOA. Fortunately the talk was well received and did raise interesting point. Subsequently the organizers have asked me to come back and give a similar talk with more architectural focus at their upcoming Enterprise Architecture Conference. For those of you who missed the earlier conference should try and make it to this one. It is well worth a look and quite a few industry leaders in the EA space will be there. Check out the web site at this URL http://www.btell.com/content/eac07/ 

If you do decide to make it do look me up.

Changing of the guard

For the past couple of years everyone from Gartner to Harvard Business Review has been talking about corporate agility, where lack of the same can kill organisations. Following In the IT press SOA has been promised at the panacea for all the ills and somehow delivering the ultimate agility to the organisations. All this hype got me thinking about why there is so much demand for agile organisations.

From an Organizational history point of view large organisations (from banks to car manufacturers) where able to mass produce goods at a higher quality and lower price point than there smaller competitors (mom and pop shops). For many years this was a great thing and lots of small businesses either became bigger or absorbed into lager organisations and some went belly up.

With the advent of Internet, and efficient global logistics (UPS, FedEx and so on) cost of advertising and distribution dropped and world became flatter. Consumers got fed up with mass produced items (there are only so many IKEA coffee tables you could buy) and started to look for customize products. They wanted something different, something tailored to their needs (home loans tailored to their needs, furniture customized to their flat). An entire market emerged to satisfy this trend and slowly it is becoming the norm rather than the exception. In such a market large organisations are asked to produce items with greater variety and lower quantity per batch. Such a shift does require some fundamental shift in thinking and many organisations have successfully made the transition.

In such a rapidly changing environment large organisations finding there huge investment in IT infrastructure preventing them to move rapidly. IT investment which once was a competitive advantage for these organisations is proving to be a disadvantage, smaller competition with no legacy infrastructure or lumbering mainframes to support are able to adapt to the changing consumers needs at a much faster rate. The question that emerges is what value IT really adds to an organisation’s revenue or profitability. McKinsey recently did a study in Europe where they looked how much value IT spends was adding to the bottom line of the organisations. The graphics below is straight out of their report and I am including it without their permission for which I apologize.

 

From the study two things were found;

• IT spending varied between 10 to 30 percent of operating costs.
• Higher levels of IT spending didn't increase the effectiveness or efficiency of the business (banks that appear to get the most business value from IT spend up to 40 percent less than the weakest performers).

The four quadrants above represented following aspects of IT spend.

• Effective business enablers, achieve the greatest business efficiency and effectiveness, from a relatively low level of IT spending.
• High IT spenders pay out about 13% of their operating revenue on IT but don’t see the desired impact on business efficiency and effectiveness.
• Heavy IT transformers, spend about 15 % of their operating revenue on IT, mainly for specific business transformation projects.
• Efficient IT executors spend just 10% of their operating revenue on IT but haven't achieved a high level of operating efficiency.

The above study if definitely interesting as I then wanted to compare how Australian Banks would fare in such a scenario, banks are interesting as they are quite intensive users of IT and have made significant investment in the same for past couple of years.

The challenge was finding the right information as I did not know anyone in the banking industry. The journey started by gathering publicly available information I.e. Annual Report which outlined how much they spent of IT or Communications. Mind you as I am no Balance Sheet expert, I may have well got my figures mixed up (at least I would have them consistently mixed up). Following graph is a summary of what I found.

The above figures are based on 2005 annual reports and represent a total IT spend of AUD $3.5 Billion of AUD $24.4 Billion operating expense. One thing that emerges is Australians don’t spend nearly as much compared to their European Competition. Commonwealth Bank and Westpac both have large outsourcing models in place, hence have a limited discretionary spending. Bank of Queensland may appear to be out there, which could be due to their large BPO contract which gets added in as an IT cost. A word of caution at this point please do not fall into the simplistic metrics trap as the figures don't really represent business value being added by IT, I am using it as a mechanism to compare entities and if their size has any relation to money they spend on IT.

If we look at the above numbers from an innovation perspective it appears large IT spend does not guarantee innovation. Smaller players like Bendigo Bank are able to offer services like two factor authentication for their web client while the bigger ends are still struggling. In the last couple of months innovation has become the buzz word and everyone is looking to IT for innovative ideas that will transform the business.

The question then emerges is innovation the domain of big players with huge R&D budgets or can smaller players outmaneuver their bigger rivals. History has proved otherwise smaller startup have been able to innovate and bring new products to market and capture a bigger slice of the market. Other have been able to open up totally new markets where none existed before Google and YouTube are prime example. If smaller players can be more adaptive and innovative  will it change the model of corporations as we know it. Will this mean we are going to see smaller more nimble players banding together and forming virtual entities yet retaining their autonomous sub parts? ...........till next time.

Architects

Not having blogged for sometime it feels a bit strange to do so again. Last few months has been hectic between the birth of our second son, and a few projects coming off the boil simultaneously (one of sensitive nature restricting what I can blog about).

Someone recently asked me what do I look for if I am hiring architect, the question caught me off guard as I had never given it much thought. In the past I have interviewed lots of Solution Architects, hired a few good ones and a few not ok ones. The problem with interviews is it is such a luck of the draw, despite the best intentions there are no guarantee of outcomes. Having said that I wanted to pen down what I thought made a good enterprise/solution/software/architect.

Architects in our information age have a unique position they sit between the business and technology acting as a bridge between competing domains. This role has become even more important as role of IT has changed from being Automating Business to Information Management and finally Business Transforming (Information Paradox). The other paradox with architects role is even though they play such a crucial role very often they have no power to direct things, other than to influence from the sidelines. Often when IT projects turn bad CIO have been know to turn to their Architects (Enterprise or Solution) and ask them where were you when the rot started (on the sidelines watching the project go downhill).

From my personal experience and what I have seen in others to be successfully architects one need to have equal parts of following professional traits.

Salesman: to be able to sell the concept to other members of the team and stakeholders. Basic sales skills are important to firstly empathize with others and understanding what they are truly looking for.

Preacher: As an architect one needs to believe in something and have the ability to appeal to others emotional core. When things don't go as planned every one in a software project team have a tendency to turn to the architect who had initially articulated the vision. During such trying times faith in ones ability should be unfaltering. The down side of being too much of a preacher are the flame wars we are so often familiar with "Linux is better than Windows", "RUP is better than SCRUM", "UML is the only modeling language the world needs".

Thinker: This is perhaps the most important ability of an architect, the ability to solve complex problems either by abstraction or separation of concern. This is the trait which gets discussed the most when talking about architects so I wont waste any more time or space.

Dana Bredemeyer and Ruth Malan in their article "What It Takes to Be a Great Enterprise Architect" describe US Constitution as a form of Enterprise Architecture and James Madison the first Enterprise Architect. They outline similar skills I have outlined above and include a few more (domain expertise, political acuity, strategic ability, and leadership skills).

Having said all this an architects job is never easy they have to often juggle multiple dimensions and competing priorities with the responsibility to articulate a solution which balances all these dimensions and then communicate it to diverse group of stakeholders. James M Butler in his book Technology Blueprints: Technology Foundations for High Performance Companies defines a form of psychosis that afflicts architects when these forces goes out of balance. Following are his list.

"Dimensional Myopia: Focusing too tightly on resolving certain dimensions of the problem space while being unaware of or choosing to ignore others

Evolutionary Vertigo: Refusing to ever commit to an approach, tactical or strategic, based on a perception that the solution spaces are changing too rapidly, thus resulting in a lack of traction

Molecular Paranoia: Working 23 hours a day to mentally maintain for real-time access all details along all dimensions and scanning all news sources for any external influence for fear of missing any single detail, relevant or not

Reverse Acrophobia: Clinging only to the highest levels of abstraction and avoiding reality-based grounding while apathetically assuming that the engineers can and will do all the heavy lifting"

I have seen Dimensional Myopia especially among architects who come from a specific stream background (I.e. Data Architects tend to see the whole world as a database). As an software architect it is important to have well rounded experience, preferably some in non IT space (manufacturing, finance and so on). Recently reviewing someone's architecture I came across Reverse Acrophobia; in this particular case solution was at a level of abstraction where reality was a problem. I am not going to comment on Molecular Paranoia as sometimes I suffer from that affliction :-).

Recently I came across a beautifully quote from Chris Bangle Chief Designer at BMW where he says "Engineers make the world happen. The role of the designer is to give them focus." In the world of IT Architects play the role of designers and software developers, hardware engineers, network engineers make it happen.

As a final word have a look at this article http://www.cio.com/archive/030105/blueprint_sidebar_five.html

VS2005 and SOAPExtensions

For the last couple of days I have been concentrating on creating some SOAP extensions that will allow me to Log messages, validate messages and monitor performance counters in my web services. I got stumped the other day when I was trying to debug the extension by adding them to a dummy web service. It turns out in VS 2005 when using the default documentation page to send soap to the web service I could not get the SOAPExtension to load. After spending a day researching I discover the problem is IE when sending the message uses HTTP GET and this does not get intercepted by the SOAP Pipleline. Finaly I had to use Altova XML SPy to send test message to the service in order to debug. Finally it is working now; just got to finish my Logging, Validating, Authenticate, Timing and Exception throwing SOAPExtension library.