Enterprise SOA implementation and management for CIOs |
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| 04 Jan 2007 | SearchCIO.com |
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SOA (service oriented architecture), when implemented properly, is the foundation upon which enterprise IT services communicate with one another. Without it, various IT services would live in little worlds unto themselves, unaware of the others existence. This Executive Guide gathers our top SOA content to get your IT services talking again.
This Executive Guide is part of the SearchCIO Executive Guide series, which is designed to give IT leaders strategic guidance and advice that addresses the management and decision-making aspects of timely topics. For a complete list of topics covered to date visit the Executive Guide section.
Table of contents
 Expert's Corner
SOA basics
Recent developments in SOA technology
The ROI of SOA
SOA and BPM
The major SOA players
More resources
Thinking outside the SOA box
[Jason Bloomberg, Contributor via SearchWebServices.com]
Today, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is finally off the ground. Most organizations are past the basic planning stage, and are now actively constructing their SOA implementations. Much work remains, to be sure; standards are incomplete, tools are immature, and companies continue to struggle with the political, cultural, and technical challenges that architectural change presents. Be that as it may, SOA has turned the corner in many ways: we're now focusing more on consuming Services than building them, issues of governance have risen to the fore, and organizations are finally working through the complexities of SOA quality.
But perhaps the most interesting sign that SOA has reached a new level of maturity are the early indications that the focus on SOA as something separate from the rest of IT is waning as service-oriented best practices gradually become accepted more broadly as general IT best practices. The fact that the spotlight of hype has shifted from SOA to greener pastures like Enterprise Web 2.0 is actually an indication that SOA best practices are becoming ubiquitous. Ironically, the more ubiquitous SOA becomes, the more it fades from view.
We're in the very early stages of this trend, however. Today, most SOA thinking remains "inside the box," in that we're still thinking of SOA as a set of activities and best practices separate from the rest of IT. Such inside the box thinking helps us understand what is still a new approach to organizing IT capabilities and leveraging them as flexible business resources. But there is a problem with this limited thinking: the business just doesn't care about the SOA box. After all, business managers care about solving the various problems the business faces on a day-to-day basis; when they require IT to help solve those problems, they generally don't care if the particular solution IT brings to the table is service-oriented or not. In a fundamental way, therefore, inside the box SOA thinking places limitations on SOA's relevance to the business.
Recognizing the SOA box
Retiring the SOA box, therefore, is an important step in providing value to the business, and the first step in getting rid of the SOA box is in recognizing its existence. By "SOA box" we mean the assumption that SOA is something distinct from other approaches that would therefore be non-SOA in some way. Inside the box SOA thinking affects all corners of the greater IT community, including IT end-users, consultants, and vendors. It behooves all these parties, therefore, to recognize the aspects of the SOA box that limit their thinking, in order to think outside the SOA box. We see the SOA box pattern of thought in many different areas of discourse. Some examples of SOA thinking that currently fall within the box:
>> Read the full column at SearchWebServices.com
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