SOA: it's about people more than about technology
I took part in a panel session during the
inaugural Oracle Enterprise Architects Club in London at the back end of last week, which focused on SOA. The Club is part of a wave of initiatives from the big IT vendors to get more engaged with that elusive group - "architects". This particular forum is about Oracle connecting with "architects" from its SI partners.
There were quite a few interesting questions but one in particular (from the near ubiquitous
Steve "Java" Jones) stood out.
All the panellists (
Miko Matsumura from Infravio and the OASIS SOA Blueprints TC;
Steve Ross-Talbot from the W3C Web Services and WS Choreography WGs and various other places; and
Anthony Reynolds from Oracle) had been talking about how the challenges of getting business value from SOA fundamentally concern how people (business and IT) work, rather than about implementing the enabling technology.
Steve's question was along these lines: "If all the big SOA challenges are about culture, organisation, etc, rather than about the enabling technology, what do you think this means for most technology vendors, who focus on selling products?". (He's followed this up on
his blog).
Well, in answer to Steve and as a general point, this is hardly the first time that systems integrators and other consulting organisations have been the ones paid to take technology products and deliver real solutions - in any new technology-driven business investment wave (ERP, EAI are two recent examples) the capabilities of systems integrators have been the key to mainstream market development.
What's interesting in the context of SOA, of course, is that one of the primary underpinning ideas is to promote standardised approaches to technology delivery. When it comes to delivering the value of SOA initiatives there's therefore obviously interest in open approaches to intellectual property concerned with SOA implementation. In a world where suppliers are busy telling anyone who'll listen how open their technologies are, the same suppliers are naturally going to look a bit less-than-committed if the tools, methods and ideas they use for SOA implementation are proprietary and closed.
That's why the OASIS
SOA Reference Model and
SOA Adoption Blueprints TCs are so key to the long-term and mainstream acceptance of SOA. They're a reason to be positive about the the future of SOA, and I recommend anyone actively investigating SOA to check them out.
