A recent article in Computing notes that Standard Life (SL) has projected cost-savings of £60m through a programme of service-oriented architecture adoption that started 10 years ago.

At the heart of this saving is reuse of a core set of business services - with services currently being reused in dozens of cases.

As well as the cost-savings, the changes have also enabled SL to bring products to market faster and to move into new markets quicker.

When creating reusable components SL note language, currency and tax regulations as variation points that may require changes in core assets.

Gartner group comment on the balance between making services too business-specific (and hence not reusable) vs. making them too generic (and hence harder to develop and reuse).

David Norton, Gartner’s research director, says “… firms can work around this by finding components that will be core to most business services.” [My emphasis] This is a little vague but I assume he means identifying or designing reusable software components that work within a defined scope rather than searching the open market for them where the organisation would stand less chance of success.

OK, maybe the post title is slightly over-dramatic but I had an interesting problem with the Bad Behavior Wordpress spam-blocking plug-in today.

When I logged into Wordpress I got the following page:

---

Error 403

We’re sorry, but we could not fulfill your request for /wp-login.php on this server.

Your Internet Protocol address is listed on a blacklist of addresses involved in malicious or illegal activity. See the listing below for more details on specific blacklists and removal procedures.

Your technical support key is: 5368-2572-1366-73cd

You can use this key to fix this problem yourself.

If you are unable to fix the problem yourself, please contact blog at software-acumen.com and be sure to provide the technical support key shown above.

---

I was slightly nervous on seeing this as we had a brief intrusion at one of our other web sites recently and I imagined the worst. However, it turns out to have been a problem with the otherwise excellent Bad Behavior plug-in itself. See Michael Hampton’s post on this and get yourself a copy of Bad Behavior 2.0.11 to fix the problem.

I’m very pleased to be able to announce our keynote speakers for next year’s Code Generation 2008 conference:

Steve CookSteve Cook works at Microsoft, and is the software architect of the Domain Specific Language Tools which are part of Microsoft Visual Studio. He is currently working on future versions of these tools. Previously he was a Distinguished Engineer at IBM, which he represented in the UML 2.0 specification process at the OMG. He has worked in the IT industry for 30 years, as architect, programmer, author, consultant and teacher. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Software and Systems Modeling Journal, a Fellow of the British Computer Society, and holds an Honorary Doctor of Science degree from De Montford University.

---

Bran SelicBran Selic is currently President of Malina Software Corp., a Canadian company that provides consulting services to Fortune 100 clients worldwide. In 2007, Bran retired from IBM Canada, where he was an IBM Distinguished Engineer responsible for defining the strategic direction for software development tools for the Rational brand. He is also an adjunct professor of computer science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. In addition, Bran is one of the founders and a member of the steering committee of the Centre of Excellence for Research in Adaptive Systems (CERAS), an institute established by the Ontario Centres of Excellence and the IBM Center for Advanced Studies. Bran has over 35 years of practical experience in designing and implementing large-scale industrial software systems and has pioneered the application of model-driven development methods in real-time and embedded applications. He is the chair of the OMG committee responsible for the UML 2 modeling language standard. Bran received his Dipl.Ing degree in 1972 and his Mag.Ing degree in 1974, both from the University of Belgrade in Yugoslavia.