We're hearing the same message from everyone who engages in service oriented architecture: SOA is hard work. It doesn't drop from the sky; it doesn't come all pre-assembled in a box; it doesn't percolate up from the ranks.
Brenda Michelson just posted remarks by Mel Greer, Lockheed Martin’s Chief SOA Architect, at a recent SOA Consortium meeting, about the challenge of taking on hefty SOA projects.
What's interesting here is what Greer had to say harkened back to something management guru Tom Peters talked about in the 1980s, when he reviewed how large companies in aerospace took on seemingly insurmountable taks: by "chunking" -- that is, breaking down projects into digestible units of work.
In his SOA discussion, Greer talked about the "spiral" technique employed at his company, which breaks a hard problem into a series of small activities, each lasting 30-90 days. Each activity, or spiral, produces an answer that moves the hard problem towards resolution.
SOA "hard problems" span six functional areas across Lockheed Martin: business, engineering, operations, security, governance and skills development.
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