James Taylor's Decision Management

I am attending webMethods Integration World this week and blogging live from the sessions. Day 2 continued with Doug Saucier of Tata talking about SOA for self-optimizing enterprises.

Doug feels that SOA is a disruptive technology because it enables change. Although there is a short-term focus is on infrastructure but longer-term it will start to impact the rest of an IT ecosystem. Business cannot run today, at least in the west, without IT - you business is your IT increasingly. Boards and management need to understand that business capabilities can only come from IT these days. So what business needs do you have? SOA is likely to be key to delivering the agility and speed you need. That said, you have to make an investment in service architecture so the big question is how to make this investment to get a return while positioning for long term development and exploitation of SOA.

Tata has an approach for moving companies to be increasingly service-oriented and this involves business alignment and technology roadmap to make it possible to develop a service-oriented enterprise for business agilty. Me I think that intra-service agility is key and that this requires a different approach. He talked a little about SOA governance and said that he typically only sees it being effective only in the context of an overall enterprise architecture governance approach. His "sound bite" advice was:

1. Start - begin to connect things in a service-oriented way. SOA is not a fad.
2. Map business needs to IT infrastructure and apply SOA where the business needs it to deliver agiliy.

I am speaking at 2:45pm on "Automating High-Volume Business Decisions within an SOA"

Technorati Tags: BRE, BRMS, business rule, business rules, service, SOA