Joe Mckendrick has been blogging about Enterprise SOA falling out of favor.

I’ll be the first person to admit that Enterprise SOA is hard. Why is it hard? Because it is at the heart of the topic of SOA. First of all lets remind ourselves what SOA is (from the OASIS SOA RM definition):

SOA is a paradigm for organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership domains.

SOA is an architectural paradigm and to its credit, it is a legitimate attempt to deal with real complexity of Enterprise Information Systems. Now what we know about these systems is that they are not created fully formed leaping out of the architect’s head like Athena from the head of Zeus, fully armored.

Enterprise systems have grown over time via accretion. The Solar system also grew via accretion and has eventually coalesced into our planetary system. Similarly, enterprise software has a planetary system–the guys from IT operations act like they are from another planet! The developers are from planet Koozbane.

So it’s not just the different branches of IT that form planets, the assortments of business units and even the central IT function are all different planets.

The fact that the systems have evolved in this configuration means that there’s a lot of value in being able to travel from one planet to the other planet. This may not be Enterprise (intergalactic) SOA, but at the very least Lifecycle SOA. Lets walk before we can run.

So while it may be helpful for us to look at the eventuality of Enterprise (intergalactic) SOA, it’s enough at the moment to establish “Interplanetary” SOA. Let's get the Development Martians talking to the IT Operations Venusians about Service Lifecycle Governance.


Miko Matsumura's thought on SOA appeared originally on the SOA Center group blog. Republished in full  by kind permission of the author.

Click here to view details of Miko's upcoming session at SOAWorld Conference & Expo 2007 West in San Francisco (November 12-13, 2007)