Hype seems to be over, reality sinking in...!!
SOA is not just about software architecture or technology
A recent survey by Ovum of 333 U.S. IT decision makers has formally announced what was obvious all this while. One in five surveyed have said that moving to SOA has created unexpected complexities.
To me, the root cause seems not to be with SOA itself but with not expecting the complexities that come with its uncontrolled adoption. There are hundreds of definitions for SOA, the tricky part is that each one of these is correct in its own context. For example, product companies are promoting a more product centric definition of SOA, which will help them sell their products. However, most of these definitions miss out on the big picture. Its like "six blind men and the elephant". What is essentially missed out is that SOA is not a technology but a concept, that its an enterprise software architectural style, its a "disruptive" way of organizing and managing business with support from agile software services.
Having interacted with IT decision makers of many fortune 500 companies, my own observation is that many organizations treat SOA as a new name for Enterprise Application Integration (and for some, its just Web services based integration). They fail to visualize the need for a different Governance model from that of traditional IT governance, they don't foresee the need for re-defining their internal organization structure, they fail to spot the opportunities to improve and automate their business processes.
Joe McKendrick opines on his blog that ITIL will help in achieving better SOA. It might be true... but I feel it addresses only a part of the problem. anyway I would like to keep this thread aside for the time being for a separate discussion sometime later. In summary, there is an agreement emerging in the industry that SOA is not just software or technology but also includes management (be it processes or people aspect)
In my view, a more appropriate definition for SOA is something like this...
SOA is an architectural strategy that helps achieve tighter Business-IT alignment by taking a three dimensional perspective of the enterprise, Viz. technology, people and processes. The key aspect of SOA is to make business functionality available as a set of well governed, standards based, loosely coupled services and processes defined in a flexible and agile manner
I am not surprised with the results of this survey at all...
- Shireesh Jayashetty
Comments
Couldn't agree more! When it comes to SOA, a few are willing to stand up and say: Emperor has no clothes?!
http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/emergingtech/technocrat/archives/services-and-soa-emperor-has-no-clothes-11339
Posted by: Mohan | August 28, 2006 01:53 PM