You have to be living under a rock not to see the ripples from Anne Thomas Manes' recent post declaring that "SOA is dead," but that there is still a need for it. In essence Anne was stating out loud what we already knew, but were unable to admit: The complexity of SOA was just too much for most global 2000 companies, and the recent round of budget cuts killed many SOA projects.
Okay, if we're not going to do SOA, than back to the basics I say. I think that it may be a better approach to focus on concepts and approaches that are more simplistic in nature, such as data integration, and perhaps use that as a jumping off point to SOA, or SOA like substance in the future.
Thus, it may be a much better approach to architecture to get your master data management and data integration house in order first, not thinking about more complex architectures, and then move up the stack from there. Indeed, if data worked better in many organizations, the architecture would naturally be more valuable and agile as well. That's something.
So, get back to basics, get back to the data.
I thought about this and if SOA is dead, we need something to replace it.
I think that is Doom Oriented Architecture or DOA for short:
http://technoracle.blogspot.com/2009/01/doa-doom-oriented-architecture-replaces.html
given everything IT does is doomed....
;-)
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Well, I am afraid, the rumour of dead SOA is too overemphasised. Even in Anne Thomas Manes' recent post, she talked not about SOA but about SOA obfuscation in IT, which is a big difference.
I certainly support Duane's proposal to elaborate a bit on Doom Oriented Architecture for Clavers (otherwise, they might read and follow SOA for Dummers compromising themselves...)
My opinion on this subject is expressed in the blog "Phoenix of Service Orientation", posted this week in ebizQ.
As of data management, it is always a fundamental task. However, is not what Business is doing (while SO is) but the result/snapshot of how well Business is doing its job. So, concentrating on data and skipping what this data is for is the last thing we can do. I hope, we are not in that bad situation (yet) after announcement of death of SOA-in-IT.