Blogger: Richard Watson
What's all the fuss about this week? Have we actually been listening to Anne at all over the years?
It's important to contextualize Anne's post amid all the week's bruhaha. The SOA is dead: long live services post just turns the volume up to 11 on the same message Anne's been giving for years. Here are a few examples:
2005 VantagePoint (SOA Reality Check) "But the road to SOA is not so smooth. Unfortunately, SOA is not an off-the-shelf product. SOA adoption requires careful planning and a profound willingness to change. It involves some new technology, but more important, SOA requires changes in behavior. It requires developers to change the way they design systems, it requires extensive education and mentoring, and it requires different incentive systems."
2006 VantagePoint (Back-to-Basics): "Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is difficult. It requires new design and development practices. It requires new levels of collaboration and cooperation across business units. It requires funds to deploy new infrastructure and tooling. It increases dependencies between systems. The risk of failure is very high."
2008 VantagePoint (Think Big, take small steps): "In many organizations, SOA initiatives will fail unless existing governance programs are modified to mitigate risk factors and support SOA principles."
"Refocus the SOA initiative on service descriptions, governance, and measurable metrics: Many organizations have reached a stage in their SOA initiative in which momentum has stalled and the business has started to question the value of the effort. Few organizations have achieved reuse, much less increased agility. High-fidelity service descriptions and helpful governance processes will facilitate reuse. Better metrics will provide the means to demonstrate the value of the initiative."
2008: (SOA Report Card): "[a] Deep investigation into the status of SOA initiatives. Goal: Identify patterns and commonalities. Found: A very sorry situation. Most SOA initiatives stall within 18 months. […] Success stories are inspiring: Initiatives invariably part of larger transformation effort"
I agree with Anne that if we're missing out the architecture, the governance and the service design principles to concentrate on the shiny new integration toys, we're missing the point, we've cried too often and that wolf is now at the door (thanks to Andrew Townley for that image). The responses to Anne's post I’ve appreciated most have echoed this, for example, Mike Kavis' post. Right on Mike, let's actually go and do some enterprise architecture and make a real transformation happen. The comment on the blog entry from Dan Creswell echoes his thoughtful piece on design and engineering principles that are at the heart of making service-orientation work.
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