The South East Asia SOA Weblog

Living in Singapore as a non-Chinese speaking Chinese descendant has given me a fair amount of inconvenience. Wherever I go, especially if I’m in Chinatown area, people try to speak Chinese with me. I have a fair knowledge of Chinese, but apparently it’s not enough to pick up with the conversation. So I usually reply by: “Do you speak English?”

It’s a common thing where people speak in the language they’re most familiar with. Technical people tend to speak with technical jargons and abbreviations, business people like to talk in business terms. This is a gap that happens in every industry, IT included. If you invite a technical guy to talk about SOA in front of business people, he will come up with technical description about SOA that includes at least 5 IT-specific jargons. This will result in more questions than understanding from the business people.

We need to bridge this gap. SOA is an architecture that helps business becoming more efficient and effective. It offers integration, orchestration and monitoring of IT infrastructure to support business goals. Business has to understand and direct SOA implementation, both business and IT have to work together to form the driving factor of SOA implementation.

As the major aspect of SOA is coarse-grained service composition, business should be shielded from the complexity of IT infrastructure and focus on making business process more efficient in order to generate more revenue for the company. IT has to speak of SOA in a more understandable English, with less IT jargon and better understanding of business domain.

In a recent event held by CTI (http://www.computradetech.com), I tried to explain SOA to a group of journalists from Indonesian media. I find the use of analogy helps a lot in explaining the concept of SOA. It helps non-technical people to get better understanding of the concept of integration, orchestration and monitoring of business processes and what benefits can be gained from implementing them. A recent article from Indonesian local media talks more about the event:

http://www.detikinet.com/index.php/detik.read/tahun/2008/bulan/05/tgl/13/time/182209/idnews/938967/idkanal/319 (the article is in Indonesian)

In short, it’s very important for us to speak and feel comfortable in the same language when we want to get an idea across. Speaking SOA in business terms to business people pretty much analogous to speaking in Chinese to an old Chinese lady selling Barley in People’s Park Center, Chinatown in the manner that we need to speak in a language that both parties understand. Fortunately for me, most Singaporeans speak English well to some extent, so I still can get my idea across although my Chinese is limited .