SOA: The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread!
Posted on 23. Dec, 2008 by vbrown in SOA
Ok… I know what some of you are thinking.
Enough about SOA already! We get it! SOA is the best thing since sliced bread.
But all the hype about Service Oriented Architecture has pretty much outlived its usefulness.
Wait…!
What I mean is, the term… Service Oriented Architecture… (or, SOA as we affectionately know it) is too mature now to be viewed as a leading-edge concept. No more hype is necessary. The elegance of the concept, and the visions we can conjure up based on the concept, are compelling enough that almost all IT shops have long ago committed to using SOA—although to widely varying degrees of adoption, from tactical to a fully-embraced strategy.
My immersion in the SOA movement came very early—about 7 years ago. In those early days, we mostly concerned ourselves with the technologies and the lowest levels of component design – how about a shared, reusable logging service! SOAP and WSDL were really cool.
Then it seemed like overnight—the result of interest and support by Gartner, Forrester, and other research firms—we leapt to the concept of reusable, encapsulated business services. Yeah! Our vision was that business users could pick and chose from a portfolio of services and… viola! User-defined applications, even suites of applications!
Since then, we’ve been hearing, ad nauseam, about SOA’s benefits. We’ve been deluged with advice on how to implement SOA; warned against SOA anti-patterns; a simple search on Amazon for books with “SOA” in the title turned up 24,352 results!
I think it’s safe to say that SOA, as an architectural paradigm/pattern/approach is well accepted. I’m sure, in fact, that lots of you think it’s too well accepted! That it’s often applied—or attempted—where it’s not appropriate. (Note: I personally think that there are very few instances where a service based, or component approach is not appropriate.)
If you noticed that I use the term “service based” and “component” you have a glimpse of how I prefer to think of SOA. It doesn’t have to involve Web Services, or SOAP, or ESBs, or even WSDL. “Service Oriented” is an approach to implementing almost any complex system—or, ecosystem. It applies at all levels in the IT space, from platforms to application software. Moving up a level in the corporate ecosystem, it also applies to the business.
A logical evolution was the vision of the Service Oriented Enterprise (SOE). Those of us who were early adopters of SOA realized that in the idealized realization we could achieve that long-sought-after goal of true business to IT alignment. If a business model is service-based it’s actually relatively easy to map IT application services to business services. Then (based on policies and business rules) we can dynamically automate and control business process flow by applying a BPM solution to tie them together.
To realize the vision of a SOE, all we need to do is create a business process model; map service components to business functions (services), define the policies, rules, and events that drive the workflow; and, wire them together with a workflow (BPM) system.
Whew! I made that sound easy, didn’t I? Of course it’s not easy. But it is possible, and the return on the effort and investment can be extraordinary—as measured by business agility, operational efficiency, and hard dollars (a controversial claim, no doubt!).
The goal of this blog is to provide information, best practices, and a forum for discussion of the issues around achieving the promises of Service Oriented Ecosystems. Topics on which I’d like to focus include:
- SOA best practices
- Governance—design, operation, data, organization and others
- Data services—a critical enabler for achieving the full benefits of SOA
- Design and development methodologies
- Business process modeling—to support the SOE
- Security
Over the next few weeks, you’ll see these topics surface as additional categories on this site. I hope the information and discussions posted here are useful and interesting. Please join me in the discussion. Your contribution is absolutely essential to make this a useful forum!
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