It's been another busy week in the world of service oriented architecture, and a lot of good thought leadership has been surfacing on the pages of ebizQ.
There's even a solution to the healthcare crisis.
Shamlan Siddiqi, director with Keane, suggests that SOA can be part of the solution to bringing our high-cost, inefficient healthcare system under control. As Shamlan observes in an article just posted here at ebizQ, the current healthcare crisis "demands the need for efficiency and transformation in the overall 'healthcare ecosystem." This transformation will be enabled efficiently through the effective and intelligent use of modern technology supported by flexible and agile architectures, such as SOA."
My colleague-in-crime Peter Schooff posted a podcast interview he recently conducted with Captain of the Cloud Dave Linthicum, who discussed the SOA-cloud convergence issues he will be addressing at his upcoming panel discussion at the SOA in Action Virtual Conference to be held October 28-29. As Dave put it: Cloud is "expanding exponentially the use of SOA. And it's funny that people that are using it don't really know they're using it.... cloud computing is really kind of the mother of all federated architectures."
In finalizing the agenda for ebizQ's 2 day SOA in Action Virtual Conference coming this Oct. 28-29, we asked readers and contributors what the biggest questions surrounding SOA are right now -- and got quite a few compelling responses. John Power asked if "the SOA concept become so watered down by the industry claiming that almost anything that can be called/invoked is a 'service' and thus if you have one or more of these 'services', you are running a SOA?"
Miko Matsumura asked: "How do large organizations expect to combine Cloud capabilities without some form of SOA Governance? The ones who don't think ahead on this may get blindsided by this."
For Dr. Setrag Khoshafian, the biggest question on SOA is about execution. "What are the specific details as well as architecture patterns and practices of how SOA can deliver robust execution on its promises, especially service re-use, agility, business value, and alignment of business and IT?"
Another forum question also drew some interesting responses. When asked if SOA may still be too IT-versus-business focused, JP Morgenthal said that he doubts "that many companies are actually generating real, high-level service models based on business functions. SOA "needs to be discussed at a level that can be understood by all C-level executives, not just the CTO and CIO."
We have been pleased to have Dion Hinchliffe, a well-known thinker and commentator on emerging Web Oriented Architecture trends, to join the ebizQ blogging community. In his first post here at the site, Dion kicked things off identifying 18 key topics impacting enterprise IT, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, SOA, and everything in between.
Our resident guru on the cloud, SaaS and connected Web, Phil Wainewright, provided some perspectives on Wal-Mart's latest offering, Retailing as a Service, or, more appropriately he says, should be called PRocess as a Service, or PRaaS.
ebizQ also published Gartner's list of the 10 Greatest Pitfalls of Enterprise Architecture, which include picking the wrong lead architect to lead the team; not engaging businesspeople enough; and failing to communicate the impact of EA.
Our resident architecture guru, Brenda Michelson, had one word for this list: "Obvious." Brenda threw a net out to her Twitter followers for better suggestions -- and received some great pointers that really made Gartner's advice seem boring, such as "Running behind a project team waving a red flag."
In his latest post, Michael Poulin looked at the matter of how to go about decomposing business operations when structuring SOA. His advice: IT must know what business is doing, what it thinks to do next and why. The opportunity to reach the holy grail of agility is attainable, Michael says, "from the moment when the business and IT start to share the same understanding of the business service structure."
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