The South East Asia SOA Weblog

Stolen from: http://geekandpoke.typepad.com:

SOA is promising a lot of things to the business world. The beautiful world painted by vendors show that SOA will help making business become simpler, more efficient, more transparent and more agile. SOA also promises re-use of IT assets in loosely-coupling manner that will deliver solutions faster and cheaper in the long run.

SOA paradigm may be relatively new in IT, but those promises are the exact same promises made by previous paradigms before SOA. Then what will make SOA different? What makes it special? Will there be a new paradigm within the next few years that will make the same promise and make SOA obsolete by comparison?

There’s this term coined a few years ago to describe poorly managed SOA implementation: JBOWS (Just a Bunch of Web Services), see: The Rise of the JBOWS Architecture. The term describes about SOA implementation with poor management and governance that ends up into a collection of web services that is not well-orchestrated, has no service registry, no proper testing, and no management tools. Is SOA starting to show its real ugly face? It is gonna be just another paradigm that fails to deliver what it promises?

Wikipedia describes SOA as an evolution rather than a revolution. It is not a new breakthrough in technology or in paradigm shift, rather it is a compilation of lessons learned from the previous mistakes and tries to come up with best practices on how to fix those mistakes.

SOA is built on standards and governance. That new SOA initiative kicked off in your organization will not deliver concrete result and success unless done with proper management and governance. Business sponsor and SOA Steering Committee play important roles within the organization to make sure that standards are adhered properly and proper governance is in place.

A proper SOA initiative dreams big but starts small. Its goal is comprehensive encompassing the entire IT integration landscape of the organization, but yet it is implemented in manageable chunks iteratively, so that within each iteration, its trajectory can be adjusted according to the ever-changing business requirements. SOA initiative should also co-exist with the existing infrastructure and fits seamlessly with the legacy applications within the organization.

SOA should be an initiative that focuses and sponsored by business while supported by strong technical skills. SOA initiative should be sponsored by key business drivers within the organizations, like LOB heads, top management and other C-level executives. Its trajectory will have to be aligned with business direction driven by business needs. It is not a technical toy that architects can play to show off the latest technical advancement in IT, it should be act as a tool that facilitates business in achieving its goal. Therefore, it is very important for all stake holders in the SOA implementation to understand the strategic goal and the business direction so that implementation can be tailored accordingly. It is a shared responsibility between business and technical leaders of the organization.

SOA is a paradigm, an architecture. Success of its implementation depends largely on the organization doing it. If done right, SOA will definitely deliver all of its promises, and some more.