The vendors may not like to hear this, but product selection may be the simplest part of SOA development and deployment.
I've been following Todd Biske's "Outside the Box" blog posts for some time now, and was pleasantly surprised to see that Todd very nicely articulated the goals of this SOA in Action blogsite. Todd, an enterprise architect with MomentumSI, described our mission as "to focus on the practitioners of SOA, not the vendors marketing it. So much of IT communication in the public domain is dominated by the vendors, not by the practitioners."
Often, the complexities in the post-product selection phase are understated, Todd continues. Vendors "have some very smart people and put out some useful information, but I tend to think that product selection isn’t what is holding companies back from a successful SOA adoption. It’s like a big chess game. Each enterprise represents a pattern on the chess board. We must recognize the patterns in front of us and make appropriate decisions to move toward success."
In fact, Todd adds, the factors involved in IT are far more complicated than chess. "Wouldn’t it be great if we knew certain players in the enterprise could only move one space at a time, diagonally, or in an L? After all, governance is about generating desired behavior. If the roles and capabilities are not well communicated, desired behavior will be difficult to achieve."
Couldn't agree more, Todd.
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