2009/1/12 Nick Gall <[email protected]>: > On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 2:12 PM, Steve Jones <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> 2009/1/11 Nick Gall <[email protected]>: >> >> > On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 3:49 PM, Anne Thomas Manes <[email protected]> >> > wrote: >> >> >> >> Exactly my point. You don't sell SOA or REST to an executive. Even the >> >> Web is a tough sell. What you sell them is the Amazon/Google IT >> >> operational model (at least in the case of Bechtel). >> > >> > Agreed. You sell the Web to the business. The you sell WOA/REST to IT as >> > part of the approach for delivering the Web. The beauty of this approach >> > is >> > that the business already knows about the Web, already believes it has >> > game-changing possibilities, etc. >> >> Which is why they have websites... that doesn't mean that REST follows >> from Web. > > Websites are a lot closer to REST than anything else the business is doing.
Indeed, but my point is that although they know about the Web, its Web sites that they know about and maybe the concept of B2B over the web/internet but WOA is not a natural jump from having a website for a business person. > >> > The problem with SOA is there is no concrete success story comparable to >> > the >> > Web to point business people to. >> >> Probably the company that they run and certainly the way that they >> perceive the globalised economy. > > Huh? You lost me. If you look at the work by Verna Allee and others on Value Networks and how they describe the global economy and organisations then its a very service oriented approach. Talking to a business person about their organisation in terms of the internal and external services with which they interact is an extremely natural conversation. They wouldn't say they are doing SOA but the way they talk about their business is based around those services and interactions, which is about as SOA as you get. > >> I've always sold SOA as being about making IT work like the business. >> The Web isn't that (see my paraphrase of a real overheard >> conversation) its a technology. > > See my prior comments on what the Web is. If you think its just > technology, you don't get it. If the Web isn't about technology then tell me the following 1) How do I organise my people in a Web Oriented way 2) How do I institute governance in a Web oriented way 3) How do I manage my change control and budgets in a Web oriented way. I might be missing something but everything WOA I've seen so far has been around the architecture, design and implementation of technology. > >> You can have WOA in a SOA world, but WOA will never get beyond the >> technology (IMO) while SOA is best done at the business level. > > Let me know when the popular press, year in and year out, reports that > SOA is disrupting major business segments the way the Web has. Then we > can talk about SOA's impact at the business level. See above, the replacement of Value Chains with Value Networks has hugely disrupted modern business, this is ineffect the switch from Process to Service orientation. I don't disagree that the Web as a channel has disrupted business and enabled more ways of working, its a cracking tool, like phones, that enables fundamentally new ways of working. But using the Web != WOA in the same way as using phones doesn't mean you have a Phone Oriented Architecture. Steve > > -- Nick >
