There's been plenty of debate raging across the blogosphere and ebizQ about the viability and business value of SOA. But did you SOA success is comparable to a fine painting?
Contributors to the ebizQ Forum took up the question of SOA's ubiquitousness
-- that is, rather than failing, has service-orientation actually taken
root in everything about IT -- developing, integrating,
embedding, and modeling? As JP Morgenthal put it: "Let's just say the
desire for SOA and the hype of SOA is everywhere. A good SOA is hard to
find!"
Tarak Modi related the story of a very talented painter named Zeuxis, who could paint amazingly life-like pictures. "Once he painted a painting of a boy carrying a basket of ripe red cherries. When he hung this painting outside his door, some birds flew down and tried to carry the cherries away. 'Ah! this picture is a failure,' he said. 'For if the boy had been as well painted as the cherries, the birds would have been afraid to come near him.' The moral of the story is that if an SOA is done correctly, it should meld into the background rather than sticking out like a sore thumb. Conversely, good SOAs are hard to find not because they don't exist but because they have become part of the fabric of the enterprise."
Speaking of SOA success, Soumadeep Sen has published a two-part series on "Your Blueprint for Success" for SOA. He notes the pitfalls holding back SOA success-- and offers solutions -- in Part 1, including Initiatives missing coherent plan; inadequate business involvement; and lack of regulatory processes. (Part I here, Part II here.)
The keys to SOA success, Soumadeep says, include transforming business to a real time enterprise; ensure sponsorship; create a reference architecture; enable appropriate consumption; and defining successful SOA initiative be measuring the degree of alignment between business and technology; increase in agility of business; increased service reuse; and reduced cost of ownership.
Meanwhile, Michael Poulin casts doubts on predictions that cloud computing will form the platform for new business process alignments. Michael smells the faint odor of smoldering dot-bombs from a decade ago in pronouncements that enterprises will be conducting transactions and computing through the Internet."How many times we have to burn our fingers?" he asks. "How many times we have to learn that "company's core processes" and other resources may not be exposed to external customers whilst the process internals are exposed to the external use? We did it with web-enabling and acquired the tragic failure 8-10 years ago."
Leave a comment