I agree. The fact is very few people that I meet understand the notion of SOA, perhaps because of the confusion some of the vendors are causing out there, misleading articles about SOA, but typically it’s the laziness of those charged with building a SOA in their organization to learn about the stuff themselves. Or, perhaps their inability to understand it…indeed many charged with defining an enterprises’ SOA don’t have to aptitude for it.

SOA is not Web services, it’s not a set of standards, it’s a holistic study as to how our enterprise architecture and trading communities can become more effective and respond better to business needs. It’s not about ESB vs. Fabric, or other such silliness. It’s not about specific products either. Are you shocked?

The fact of the matter is that many companies are funding SOA efforts without any understanding of neither the notion nor the ROI that is expected. The end result is a failure because the objectives were never well defined, nor did anyone in the organization understand the real issues at play when making this effort.

So, what do we do? I thought the blog defined it well:

“How can we address such perceptions-in-waiting? Education, education, education. Through education about what the building-block standards really do for the business; through targeted, well-focused, specific implementation projects, such as saving development resources through reuse of code that formerly required many hours of development time, or connecting up several back-end legacy systems through a Web-centric interface. And, most of all, SOA needs enlightened management, goaded by an individual taking on an evangelist role inside the organization. SOA can work, but it runs the risk of being derailed by inflated expectations and under-educated management. “

Right on!