New York Magazine Hearts SOA

This week we continue our move from dissertation to illumination with another live interview, this time with Albert Lee, Executive Director of Information Technology for New York Media LLC, the publisher of New York Magazine, NYMag.com, and MenuPages.com.

All of the IT projects and professionals featured in this interview series have one thing in common. They’re heading up efforts to transform their organizations from legacy, modular, or distributed architectures to those with a service orientation. But that’s where the similarities end.

Each is taking a different path to SOA empowerment. Some are global, top-down, “big science” projects that emphasize business process modeling tools, SOA-savvy product and technology stacks, strict governance, and corporate-engineered cultural shifts. And sometimes, a cadre of consultants.

Others are the result of bottom-up skunk works, where apps are cobbled together by hand, using little more than a language, compiler, debugger, and some Web and application servers. Some are built on a commercial software backbone. Others are religiously open source (and have devised unique ways to better exploit free software, as we will see in a future interview).

Some are clean-slate efforts. Others wire a mix of new, old, and legacy systems. And some, such as the one you will hear today, achieve SOA with an agile development methodology coupled with an off-shoring twist.

The paths may vary, but the results are consistent. So please listen in as I interview Albert Lee, executive director of Information Technology for New York Media, on the organization’s innovative approach to an Agile SOA.

Know of an interesting SOA implementation? Write to me.