[Edited to fit your screen, er, to remove the side bar rants] We've been a quiet group of late! Here's a rake for the muck....
A Joe McKendrick blog entry covers the question, "Is it time to fold SOA into Enterprise Architecture (EA)?" http://blogs.zdnet.com/service-oriented/?p=1054 The article states that SOA, EA and BPM are all the same and have all the same underpinnings. Are people finally realizing that SOA isn't a new area in and of itself? Is this the beginning of the end for SOA being at the center of attention? I can only hope so. :-) Recall that service orientation was first applied to application design, at least according to Gartner literature. Building applications as a set of coarse-grained, business level services in which the interface was independent of the implementation would lead to a more flexible and adaptive application. Many people took this same concept and said "Hey! That would work at an enterprise level too!" Indeed, this notion applied at the enterprise level should provide even greater benefits. The promises of service orientation don't really pay off well at just the application level--it needs to span the enterprise. If we can get solutions built around the notion of services instead of the silos of applications, then we should see great benefits in terms of speed to solution, flexibility, etc. Other folks saw this service level focus and thought it applied best at the business level. What a great idea! Describing the business in terms of services seems to be a very natural fit. People can really wrap their heads around that. And this business level structure should map quite nicely onto service oriented technical structures. Brilliant! Here's the challenge: Each of those levels wants to use the term SOA. IMO, none of them should. Those levels already had terms: application architecture, enterprise architecture and business architecture. Each of them can follow service oriented principles. Each of them will follow other principles as well. SOA doesn't introduce another level of design. Rather, it modifies how we approach the design levels we already use. Business level design, mapping of business constructs to technical constructs, governance, etc. all need to happen, whether they follow service oriented principles or not. Service orientation changes the how of performing these things but let's not lose sight of the fact that they were needed long before SOA came on stage and will be needed long after SOA is but a distant memory. Long live service oriented! But SOA must die! :-) -Rob
