Nailing Jello to the Wall

 

Joe McKendrick has a blog entry about just a bunch of Web Services and SOA.   He cites some research from Saugatuck that states "...many companies are merely managing a collection of Web services, and have yet to make a strong commitment to SOA as a management discipline".  

Joe asks: what constitutes a "proper" SOA? 

I think the answer is simple – if it meets the needs of the organization its proper, if it doesn’t its improper.    

One organization’s SOA may look like just a bunch of web services to another because they will have different business needs and objectives.

(BTW - I refuse to grant the phrase "just a bunch of web services" acronym status. You should too.)

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 11, 2007
  That bunch of web services would be part of a SOA if they 1) map 1-1 to the business services supported within the organization and 2) if they are managed (directory, mediation, virtualization) to meet the requirements of agility and reusability of the EA. It's even better if the services are used from an higher level, a BPMS or IC-BPMS (service orchestration, process management, activity monitoring). These two technologies (SOA and BPM) complement each other pretty well and should definitely play a much more important role in enterprise architecture.

• Anonymous
  January 12, 2007
  +1 on the convergence of SOA and BPM.  I'm not very happy with the IC-BPMS acronym - this is nothing more than categorizing products that already exist (causing more confusion into the SOA space - the last thing we really need right now).  

• Anonymous
  January 12, 2007
  Names will come and go ... Integration Broker, ESB, BPMS, IC-BPMS etc. IMO that is just a result of the prevailing unification between the technologies leading to the understanding of SOA/BPM. Btw: good job with the BPEL spec ... I'm a big fan that "language".

• Anonymous
  January 22, 2007
  Sometimes thinking differently is a good thing. I'm not sure if this is one of those times . To be honest