In fact, some experts are furiously "service thinking." William Briggs, senior manager of business integration and optimization for Deloitte, just published a piece here at ebizQ about our evolution from SOA as a tactical IT approach to more strategic "Service Thinking," which defines and builds business capabilities, the core set of abilities to answer the question "how do we create value for our customers and return to our shareholders?"
Working to answer this question will help address the perception of failure around SOA, Briggs states. He blames the "limited traditional definition of SOA," in which "the scope of SOA initiatives is too often restricted to the technology arena, focused on interfaces and the movement of data between systems and the implementation of vendor tool offerings."
"Ignoring organization, business process, and the rest of the technology domains (application development, infrastructure, security, etc.) greatly limits the potential benefits of SOA," Briggs adds. That's why it's time for Services Thinking.
A lot of businesses could benefit from services thinking with a lower-case "s" as well.
Michael Poulan also talked about services bridging the gap between IT and business in his latest post. "The concept of service orientation can easily bridge the gap between business and IT if applied as the driving concept to the enterprise organization. In other words, for technical services to succeed and provide for real business tasks, the business and technology have to be organized oriented on services." Michael adds that he has just published a book on the topic, titled Ladder to SOE, in which he promotes the idea of "service orientation as glue for business and IT collaborations as well as an elixir of change adoptability and business efficiency."
Congratulations on the book launch, Michael! Remember us folks back here while you're busy lunching with J.K. Rowling!
More on bringing the business closer to IT, or vice-versa: Jessica Ann Mola also posted her chat with Richard Soley, head honcho of Object Management Group, on OMG's new Business Ecology Iniative (BEI), which is "focused on erasing the artificial lines between business and Information Technology (IT)."
OMG, the OMG is on the business-IT alignment case!
We also heard from a ton of experts on one of our latest Forum topics, "How Will SOA Vendors Adapt to the Emerging Cloud Paradigm?"
Miko Matsumura, who has been working with governance solutions for quite some time, notes that "the essential component for adaptation to the cloud environment is SOA Governance capabilities." That's because "in the foreseeable future, cloud adds more complexity, not less into
the already overburdened IT environment. It solves one set of business
problems (elastic scalability and variable cost model) but creates
additional complexity of integration." Kelly Emo agrees that governance is the hot button for supporting the cloud.
Michael Meehan, on the other hand, doesn't see governance as the major vendor pivot point between SOA and cloud computing. Addressing virtualization will be the big challenge, he says."The big change on the product side, IMO, is going to be that the virtualization inherent in all of this will require SOA governance and management solutions to perform comprehensive virtual systems management as well. And that might create an opening for traditional systems management vendors (HP, IBM, CA, BMC) and interlopers from the virtualization space (VMware) to further invade what we currently consider to be the SOA governance and management space."
Mike, are you predicting that SOA vendors need to keep their eyes on VMWare? Interesting.
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