Gervas Douglas wrote:
> If only life were so simple, whoever you are (please sign your messages
> in future: this is a convention of this Group - Moderator). Still, I
> think it is probably about time the Great Minds of this Group’s
> Distinguished Denizens had another crack at defining SOA.
SOA is the rewiring of business (not just enterprise) software and people
systems to be visible as domain targeted services that allow the business to
trivially interact with these systems. This creates a decoupling from the
business processes which facilitiates a separate development and evolution path
of the systems and the business's services.
People can usually be retasked much easier than software. So, an SOA which
envolved people systems would provide the ability to request exactly the needed
service. The people in the system(s) required, would work together to provide
the needed service (this is where the outside perception is procedural). As an
example, I might need to take a trip. I'd like to just say, I need to travel
from here to there, for 10 days, need a car, a smoke free room, vegetarian
meals
etc. An SOA HR department would task all the appropriate people to provide me
this service, without me having to contact each "system" to get the little
piece
done that I need.
On the software side, there are similar examples where I, as a customer rep,
might need to get a new version of an application with a bug fix for my
customer. Rather than me going over to a development supervisor, and
describing
my customers problem, and then being forwarded to a developer, who then spends
30minutes telling me how exasperatingly hard it was to find that problem, and
who then proceeds to show me how it was fixed. Finally, he kicks off a build,
and we talk about the recent fishing trip he went on. In about 20 minutes, the
build finishies, and he grabs a CDR off the shelf and burns me a new disk for
my
customer...
With an SOA, I would just fill out a ticket with the customers problem. That
ticket would then flow to the supervisor who would tag it as important and send
it to the developer. The developer would then tell the system which
appropriate
fix needs to be targeted to that customer. The SOA would add the appropriate
SCM based change to my customers build, and queue a rebuild. Finally, the tick
would be closed, and I'd receive notification with information about where the
build is. I'd then request a production CD be created and shipped to my
customer. Bingo, a service has been performed for me, by underlying software
and people systems that just kept doing what they've been doing, but now have a
service structure which provides the business process control needed.
Just my views...
Gregg Wonderly
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