Don't throw the SOA baby out with the marchitecture
Marketing departments love jumping on 'new' ideas and adopting them as their own, which can muddy the waters for those who have been using the concepts for years. Cf SOA, which is becoming an increasingly chaotic area - ironic really, given that it is rooted in some really quite simple concepts. Our pals over at
Redmonk have been debating how SOA has been hijacked by the marchitects: "it's largely failed in that Holy Grail task of bringing the propeller heads and the suits together," says Cote.
This is partially, but not entirely true. The good news comes from the organisations that are looking at using SOA, in that they view it not as some massively complex change to their existing ways of working, more as an incremental, evolutionary approach that enables it to think about its capabilities in business-meaningful terms, and the adoption of base principles such as contractural relationships between service suppliers and consumers. To quote my esteemed colleague
Neil Ward-Dutton, "None of the companies I've talked to are dumb enough to try and re-engineer their entire organisations' IT infrastructures top-down in some kind of elephantine SOA engineering folly." In marked contrast to the goings-on in vendor-land, the approach is far more pragmatic.
This shouldn't come as a surprise, given that SOA doesn't actually exist, not as a product in any case. Perhaps the hand-flappings of the marketeers suggests as much about their inability to turn a concept into a product, as anything about gung-ho repurposing of the concept itself. Let us not spend too much time worrying about this: while the vendors try to out-market each other, organisations are quietly getting on with the job. The worst thing we could do would be to dismiss SOA as marchitecture, just because it has been hijacked; this would also dismiss the real value that SOA can bring.
