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I was forwarded an excellent article written by Kevin Kelly, now of Kemar Solutions, from a new book called Secrets of SOA. Kevin worked for the Irish national airline in the 1960s on a project that with hindsight he believes was Service Oriented. In the extract, Kevin describes the cultural and attitudinal changes required by SOA (The first chapter is free to download from the site and includes this piece as well as others).

Kevin makes some excellent observations on the 1960s project and its relevance to any SOA project today. In particular, he stresses the idea that if the culture of an organizational is truly service oriented, developers will begin to naturally reuse:

“SOA is as much a state of mind as it is a technology. It’s as much about behavior and orientation as it is about programming per se. When I came to IPARS at Aer Lingus [The project he worked on], the overall orientation was a fait accompli; we were introduced to it as the way the system worked. It never occurred to us to vary from that orientation.”

He also stresses that to reuse is not the behavior previously encouraged in developers – in fact it is quite the opposite as developers are normally rewarded for innovation. Therefore, as I said last time, organizations need to make it clear that they reward reuse. As Kevin puts it:

“The decision to reuse is usually a good decision for the enterprise but often a painful decision for the solution builder accustomed to being rewarded for innovation and technical know-how… If we preach reuse while rewarding developers who pay no attention to it, we should not be surprised when the majority of developers perceive reuse as unimportant.”

And finally, Kevin stresses that SOA is about culture change as much as technology change:

Because of this existing critical mass [in the Aer Lingus project], it was easy to follow the example of our predecessors and continue in the service-oriented vein. It’s not so easy when you start trying to introduce SOA to an organization with no experience. It’s necessary to have a holistic approach, one which includes organizational, behavioral and attitudinal perspectives. Having a sound technology base will certainly help, but you need more, and it’s a slow haul.

Posted by rbradley in SOA Organization Issues • SOA concepts |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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