PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD The term “service-oriented architecture” should win a medal for having survived the largest acronym barrage in technology history. No sooner was SOA able to shrug off the affront that it was really just warmed-over modular programming from the 1970s than it was forced to counter the terminology that it was metadata wrapped in an XML container communicating via SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol).
Despite being encumbered with a sufficient number of acronyms and hype-enthused press releases to drag it permanently under water, the concept of computing services being assembled and delivered in the name of business strategy has survived for a very good reason: The idea makes sense. Rather than treating every business application as a greenfield for lengthy app development, why not make use of what you have and what others are offering? Assemble the application irrespective of what hardware a company has and get on with the business of business.
Here are five steps that need to take place to make SOA real for all businesses great and small:
1. Governance: Just as virtualized hardware systems need strong administrative tools to avoid the descent into computing chaos, the same is true of service applications. In fact, I’d argue that companies planning to broadly adopt SOA should start with governance.
Applications built from internal and external services will generate prodigious amounts of data that has to be accessed, acted upon and exchanged. Having loosely coupled applications does not mean they are loosely controlled.
2. Security: If you build a business process that involves private customer data, you are responsible for the well-being of that data, period. If that process involves using resources outside your company, you should be absolutely certain about the security procedures in place and the liabilities involved.
3. Business process: As application developers have learned to their misfortune over the years, business operations do not operate in neat boxes, and the application you carefully modeled three years ago bears little resemblance to how the business runs today. The next big thing in service-oriented architectures is to build services that can operate and morph in real time to truly reflect business operations.
The analysts at Gartner and elsewhere are trying to coin the term "SOA 2.0" for this next iteration of services. While I am hesitant to tag anything with the 2.0 name, there does need to be some way to describe services that are indeed oriented to evolving with the business.
4. An SOA ROI calculator: The SOA concept makes a lot of sense. You can reuse chunks of services that you pay for or rent instead of building everything from scratch. You can look at what you are currently paying for business application development and start asking why you can’t get more use from those applications.
Why not reuse those services within the company for new applications or maybe start leasing those services on the outside? Developing an ROI calculation based on the entire software application life cycle is a tricky prospect, but it would help SOA adoption.
5. Learn the language of business: Technology advocates of service-oriented architectures speak one language, and business executives speak the language of business. Business executives have no idea, nor should they, about the concepts surrounding BPEL, SOA, SOAP or mashups. They know that economic indicators are pointing to the end of the current recession, and they want to get their company ready to do some business.
You need to learn the language of business if you are going to sell SOA in your company. Practice giving an entire presentation about the benefits of service-oriented architectures without once using an acronym. By all means, avoid getting into the details of technology standards. Instead, understand the business you are in and explain how you can make your company run faster, smarter and less expensively using SOA.
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