(Phoenix, a mythical bird that dies in flames and is reborn from the ashes)
The New Year has started with a surprise overlooked by all predictions written by IT industry analysts and experts. I mean the announcement made by Anne Thomas Manes of Burton Group about the death of SOA in IT (which is not the same thing as the death of SOA) and followed a flow of blog-posts.
Well, it seems that something supernatural is going on about SOA - it is proclaimed dead the second time for last 2.5 years (Judith Hurwitz, President & CEO, did it in 2007 the first time). However, it is very much alive - just look at the hundreds of new jobs posted on the Internet recently. In this case, what is dead?
When SOA was coined by Gartner's Roy Schulter it meant literally Service-Oriented Architecture. Unfortunately, it was totally overtaken by Web Service technology which has very little in common with service orientation (besides the word 'service'). Anne, if somebody reads her post to the ends, points that the wrong-doing in IT with SOA is finally dead. Service Orientation is absolutely alive and quite healthy. Those, who took 'service orientation' as an 'orientation on service' and acted respectively, got promised SOA ROI; others, who took 'service' as a name instead of a concept - got troubles.
Service orientation is not what we do, it is how we think about doing; SOA's what we do. This is why a role of thinkers - Business and Technical Architects - is so important in any company.
Proclaimed SOA death in IT is actually a positive observation. It can open eyes and ears of IT people and allows them to look at Business and its service needs. When talking to business people, the word 'service' is not a stranger but, on a contrary, a common word. The reason of dead-SOA-in-IT is in that IT tried to sell SOA to the Business meaning anything but business service and service orientation.
It is time now to understand that service orientation is the core of any Business. IT does not need to invent its own creatures. Service Orientation starts in the Business and cascades via Business and Technical Architecture into the technical development in IT. That's simple. Technical services have to be just continuations of the business entities - services, functions, features and business processes. IT has to elevate its horizon to address those entities first and low-level operational procedures, that IT spends the most of its resources on, second. These procedures are just implementations of real business entities and implementations could be modified or discarded at any moment in the fast changing economical environment.
Thus, Service Orientation is about business and technical efficiency, flexibility and agility to the market demand and business changes. In a while, there will be new concepts, technologies and solutions but Service Orientation will go away only together with modern Business. Long live Service Orientation!
References: OASIS SOA RM standard and ITIL v.3
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