Really Now, What is SOA?
That's a tough question.
Most vendors want you to believe it is a product they sell. Wrong! It's supposed to be about our business, not theirs. From Irving Wladawsky-Berger's blog SOA, Services and Business Architecture, he says "SOA has been gaining ground as an effective mechanism for defining business services, the software that implements such services, and the software-based tools that enable people to effectively take advantage of them." and "The hope is that with SOA and the many different tools developed around it we will be able to design, simulate and test business services in business terms - prior to their implementation in IT systems."
SOA is a business process - Service Oriented - which depends on repeatable business processes being identified, automated and (hopefully) shared. The A part of SOA gets us into trouble and implies that SOA is an Architecture when in fact it can be implemented and supported by many architectures. That is why Brenda Michelson refers to SOA implementation as Service Orienteering. We in IT love our technologies, and hence we tend to focus on the Architecture part of SOA - perhaps because that is most familiar to us. Bad TLA!
Al W.
Most vendors want you to believe it is a product they sell. Wrong! It's supposed to be about our business, not theirs. From Irving Wladawsky-Berger's blog SOA, Services and Business Architecture, he says "SOA has been gaining ground as an effective mechanism for defining business services, the software that implements such services, and the software-based tools that enable people to effectively take advantage of them." and "The hope is that with SOA and the many different tools developed around it we will be able to design, simulate and test business services in business terms - prior to their implementation in IT systems."
SOA is a business process - Service Oriented - which depends on repeatable business processes being identified, automated and (hopefully) shared. The A part of SOA gets us into trouble and implies that SOA is an Architecture when in fact it can be implemented and supported by many architectures. That is why Brenda Michelson refers to SOA implementation as Service Orienteering. We in IT love our technologies, and hence we tend to focus on the Architecture part of SOA - perhaps because that is most familiar to us. Bad TLA!
Al W.
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