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March 21, 2006How broad is your SOA: The Excel Test
There is an inherent tension within Service Oriented Architecture between its need to be encompassing – and hence avoid the old problem of creating islands of integration which must in turn be integrated– and the need for it to be sufficiently well-defined to be something that can meaningfully implemented today.
A great example of this tension is highlighted by the role or otherwise given to Microsoft Excel in a SOA. Excel is an interesting product in that it often shows the rift between centralized IT and the business units. The reality is that within many if not all organizations Excel is used to make important and complex business calculations and Excel spreadsheets full of reference data and formulas are circulated by email between users and departments. To put it another way: Excel often lives outside the remit and control of IT departments even though it is carrying out core business calculations. This shadow existence should cause people major concerns around audit and control (how can I check the calculations are correct, how can I check the data used is up to date, how can I record the excel formulas used to make a business decision for audit purposes). All of this is very much on the radar screen of some enterprise architects that I am aware of – but it is not an easy problem to solve: in particular the business like the benefits of the current approach and hence cannot simply be told to stop using Excel.
Coming back to SOA, how do we integrate something like Excel into SOA? If we don’t, we are limiting the scope of SOA to only a subset of the enterprise – and hence back to creating islands of integration. If we want to include it, what does this even mean? It is certainly not about treating Excel worksheets as simple data sets to be converted into XML as some vendors propose (the formulas and relationships are at least as important as the data). Unfortunately, there aren’t any easy universal answers: However, it is a good question to pose to your potential software or services vendor and the thoughtfulness of their answer should indicate whether they are really thinking about SOA or see it as simply another magic bullet to sell.
Posted by rbradley in
SOA concepts
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"whether they are really thinking about SOA or see it as simply another magic bullet to sell"... I agree it is one of the important question to be asked to a potential software or service vendor.One more thing i would like to add here may be this will be useful to other blog readers, recently "software as a service" company StrikeIron, better to call webservices provider came up with a Add-in product for Excel 2002, they claim "Simply drag–and–drop your Web services fields directly into Excel". What do you think about this. Should we ask our provider that our webservices should be easily accessible from Excel.By calling webservice from Excel may be we can reduce island of data created by end-user.
http://www.strikeiron.com/tools/tools_ondemand.aspx
Posted by: John at March 22, 2006 08:35 PM
The way I see this issue is:
1. Excel is very easy to use and offers tremendous amount of opportunities to the managers and decision makers. An excel sheet given the raw data can be manipulated by a manager with very little knowledge of computers and programming. They are based on simple formulas and the decision makers can use the same raw data to do various calculation.
2. If by some means we can provide a spreadsheet kind of view of our raw data to the end user and let them perform the operation. We can store the formulas and different manipulations they do on the data. Store them and later present them with updated set of data. Like YTD Production, Sales data etc.
My 2.2 Cents (includind GST)..
Posted by: Samir Mishra at March 23, 2006 06:28 PM
Very good site, congratulations!
Posted by: cashmere at April 13, 2006 03:51 PM
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