A survey tends to show an average characteristics and hide exceptions, even very useful and important ones. Plus, we should remember that average characteristics and survey numbers are just snapshots of extremely influenced mind-sets and their reflections. A survey demonstrates where we are and cannot point to where we should be. As we know, not everything we have today is really practical and 'allows our tomorrow'.
All data integration and BPM things are important but why they have to be associated with SOA? How much service orientation in data integration? Why a service cares whether data is integrated when the only what the service needs is data available to it in accordance to the service's meta-data requirements? I can formulate similar questions to BPM and 'SOA'. One User Experience expert who wrote many books about useless but elegant design of different things, told me once when we discussed the management controls of a UI for a SW product: 'if you think that this UI has to have several buttons in this screen, think again. It needs the only one button if you want the best User Experience - this button name is STOP'. Business processes have deviated from the real business services (i.e. actual business needs) that far and became that complex that they need special management. It is not good. I always apply a rule - before thinking how to manage a process or enhance it, think if this process is really needed today (with all respect to yesterday needs) - Michael ________________________________ From: Gervas Douglas <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, April 2, 2009 7:56:50 PM Subject: [service-orientated-architecture] Roch gets practical with SOA <<A survey of the audiences at TechTarget Application Development Group member sites proves some points that I have been making about SOA for a long time. First, the most common entry point to SOA is integration. "Frye writes that today's SOA projects are largely about integration. Survey results show that the top benefits organizations hope to achieve with SOA are improved data integration (32%), enable legacy application integration (32%) and integrated disparate department applications (23%)." The next common entry point, and one that I have argued is the next level of maturity from an application perspective, is business process management. "Meanwhile, there is interest and uptick in Business Process Management with 29.7% of respondents marking BPM as one of the critical areas for their organization' s technology efforts. At the same time, 35.8% of respondents counted Business Process Management software among the types of infrastructure software currently used, with 38% planning to use it in the future." And finally, SOA definitely is not dead! "She notes that SOA use is strong. Among the survey respondents, 49% said their organization has one or more SOA projects under way, and 60% characterize their current or future SOA projects as enterprise level as opposed to departmental/ divisional level (21%), or single, isolated projects (19%)." This is just the common sense approach to using SOA to improve application integration, thereby reducing maintenance and support costs within IT and reducing duplicate data entry and errors for the end-users. And using SOA to improve business processes to reduce labor costs and improve productivity is the next step after integration - end-to-end process automation most often requires integrated systems. Ten years after I started working in this space we are back to the reality and hard work of making SOA pay for itself in the same ways this all started - the integration of distributed systems and improvement of business processes. This is SOA blocking and tackling and there is still a great deal of it to be done.>> You can read this blog at: http://it.toolbox. com/blogs/ the-soa-blog/ soa-survey- points-to- practical- approaches- 30900 Gervas
