As SOA becomes mainstream, people are beginning to look for the next development. Convergence with Web 2.0 could provide this, but many enterprise architects are nervous about SOA 2.0, as it is sometimes called.
This topic came up on day two of The Open Group's Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in San Diego. The term "Web 2.0" refers to a second generation of Internet-based services - such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies - that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users. It features the combination of services provided by external enterprises to create so-called mashups of information drawn from different sources, and the exposure of core capabilities as services that external enterprises can use.
So each enterprise will do what it is good at, and mix and match the best information from outside sources to deliver a complete package. This sounds like a recipe for real progress. Where is the problem?
What concerns many people is the lack of discipline and control. With the latest tools, it is easy to create mashups, but will their creators take the trouble to maintain them in the long term? Where services are combined without proper transactional control, how can data integrity be preserved? How can distributed development work without central governance?
These are serious questions. The short answer to them is that companies such as eBay do expose core capabilities as web services, and other enterprises do use them. This may be a new phenomenon, but there are working examples today, and we can expect the art of using and combining external services to become better understood as it is more widely used.
This art lies in creating an environment in which collaborative operation can take place and evolve, rather than in trying to impose central control on all services used by the enterprise. Architects who insist on controlling everything should indeed be frightened. For the others, the convergence of SOA with Web 2.0 is an exciting prospect.
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