In my blog entry, I discuss that the value of the design is that MickeyD's can outsource the taking of orders or supply the service themselves and in either case, the consumer is mostly unaffected (hopefully the right decision provides a higher quality of order fulfillment) The key component in that story is not so much that technology allows this to occur, but that strategically MickeyD's has options about what resources they will own and which they will outsource. This is straight out of Peter Drucker 101. So, SOA designs allow business to grow and scale in an effective manner.
I still contend SOA has NOTHING to do with IT. It's a generic architectural principal and I can use it to design ANY type of system in the universe; especially ones that have nothing to do with technology, including the design of an enterprise itself. The fact that good ideas are not reused across verticals is unfortunate, but not new. It's where I built my entire analyst firm showing how methodologies in one vertical can be applied to other verticals. _____ From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of William Henry Sent: Thursday, November 23, 2006 1:17 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [service-orientated-architecture] Howard of Bloor on SOA Hi JP I read your blog. Nice story. BUT I was right about the "who" and your MickyD story doesn't help. The problem is that with a "who" you are suggesting that there is a standard industry contract/protocol/way of doing things for every service. The example works great "within-in" McDonalds - the "who" works within McDonalds. The who is a McDonalds "implementation" detail. McDonalds is , perhaps, providing a *better* service than other fast food providers. It is different. I have to drive to a different location etc. Though the drive through experience has been somewhat standardized it is still adjustments that mean the there is impact to some of the consumers operations. Also, as much as we'd like to say that SOA is not about IT, it still is. That's like saying that architecture in the traditional sense is NOT about building construction. Also, go to any other industry and ask them about SOA. You'll get blank looks unless you are talking to IT folks. SOA is an IT term even though it's benefits can be applied to manual business processes. However what I do like most about your statement is that you put the focus on the consumer. Too often SOA is focused on the provider. Regards, William On Nov 23, 2006, at 8:13 AM, JP Morgenthal wrote: William, I disagree with your response. I go with the "who". I use the example in my blog entry <http://www.avorcor.com/morgenthal/index.php?entry=entry061110-141702> http://www.avorcor.com/morgenthal/index.php?entry=entry061110-141702(sorry you don't all want me to reiterate the whole entry here, trust me) of McDonalds developing order taking as a service. The only technology there is telecommunications and point-of-sale. And there is a difference between distributed object computing and SOA. I have done CORBA for years and it's very easy to change the provider, without touching the contract, and the whole application will still break, why? Because, the application is designed monolithic with regard to the controlling processes and the service are just modules of the larger application. Thinking in services is not the same as thinking in objects. Services are business-oriented. JP _____ From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of William Henry Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 6:17 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [service-orientated-architecture] Howard of Bloor on SOA Hi JP, Not a flame. I just think you need to clarify that it's not the service provider in terms of "who" is providing the service, but it's really the service implementation. And of course a change to the service contract is really a new service and therefore, as you point out, doesn't impact any of the consumers using the existing service. But is this the definition of a service or a service oriented architecture? I like the use of the term operations but it includes some of the non-functional behavior like logging and security etc. William On Nov 22, 2006, at 1:30 PM, JP Morgenthal wrote: I came up with a test to determine if your architecture is SOA compatible. Let me know what you all think of it! Your architecture is SOA-compatible if you can change the service provider without impacting any of the service consumer's operations. Flame away! _____ From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Gervas Douglas Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 2:33 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [service-orientated-architecture] Howard of Bloor on SOA <<SOA (service oriented architecture) is a big deal, I like it. But it isn't the be all and end all of computing. Here are ten things you need to know about SOA. 1. You can't sell SOA. SOA allows your company to be more flexible. SOA enables the agile enterprise. Oh, yes. But you can't build a business case or cost justification out of flexibility or agility, you can only build that based on resolving a business issue or issues. In appropriate circumstances SOA may enable a business solution to a business problem: that's all. 2. Even if you could sell SOA you couldn't because you can't describe to a business person what it is. The truth is that there is no good definition of what SOA is. Even as a concept it is fragile and different vendors and analysts will give you different (and nebulous) definitions. If even the IT industry cannot agree on a definition, how can you expect the business to understand it? The best that can be said is that it represents a set of enabling technologies. 3. Business Process Management (BPM) is not SOA. You can do either without the other though doing SOA without BPM might be tricky. 4. BPM engines represent a potential bottleneck for SOA. If everything is built around BPM and your services have to keep referring back to the BPM engine for instructions then that engine can become a bottleneck. You may therefore need to have multiple such engines with an "engine of engines" for orchestration. A better idea might be to have intelligent services, where appropriate, which understand their own routing and can maintain state information: thereby reducing the calls necessary to the engine. 5. BPM isn't enough anyway. It's fine for fairly simple processes but can become impractical when environments are very complex and, especially, where the business is exception-driven. This is the role of (complex) event processing (CEP). 6. Most vendors in the SOA space acknowledge the potential role of event processing but don't understand it. For example, I have seen SOA presentations where CEP is confused with operational BI-style event processing. Certainly there is a place for this in SOA (throughput monitoring for example rather than the instance monitoring of BAM [business activity monitoring]-though the two should really be combined). Oracle, which does understand event processing, has CEP at level 5 in its maturity model for SOA: which is fine, except that CEP can be implemented totally independently of SOA. 7. You don't need to use SOAP (simple object access protocol). Funnily enough, this isn't as simple as it is supposed to be-there are alternatives that are simpler. 8. One of the biggest potential paybacks for SOA is in the ability to reuse services. But how do you make this happen? We couldn't do it for objects and we couldn't do it for components so why do we think we can do it for services? We can set up SOA governance and implement IT policies and rules but does that mean that developers will abide by them? When the pressure is on? When this job has to be finished by tomorrow? 9. And talking about governance how is this going to work-what is the relationship between SOA and data governance, for example? If part of the purpose of governance is to establish the ownership of processes and data then that is a problem, because ownership implies responsibility and people will shy away from the latter if given half a chance. The theoretical models put about for governance are all very well but if they can't be applied in the real world (at least some of the time) then we need more pragmatic sets of "the best we can reasonably get" practices rather than aiming for the ideal all of the time. 10. Data is largely ignored (IBM is an honourable exception here) by most of those talking about SOA but if SOA is about undoing the Gordian knot of spaghetti that most company application architectures look like then shouldn't the same be the case for the similarly complex data environment?>> You can read this at: <http://www.it-director.com/technology/applications/content.php?cid=8996> http://www.it-director.com/technology/applications/content.php?cid=8996 Gervas
