Correct and troubling..

Very interesting and a little troubling! SOA as an idea is nothing new, the acronym is. At the time when IT was a profit center, anybody remembers?, all the business units, including IT, did work together. Maybe going back to that? A good article and a good paper. Now - how to get the decision makers to read and to comprehend it?

When will IT get back to the business, too long seen as a separate entity in corporations and everyone is suffering. It is not any more or any less difficult than any other business function, it was just made to look that way as any new technology based function. We should be over it and I can understand that people with limited exposure outside of IT may think that it is special - it is not, it is just a way to enhance how to do the business. Any trade needs skills, try beauty, dietary, fashion, or maybe the growing nanotechnology - each as or more expensive as IT but seems to work better with the rest of business than IT? You think that ready made products, how to configure them, how to push the buttons, etc will work on those trades? Or in any business?

SOA is like what we did a long time ago for some insurance, banking, manufacturing, etc systems a long time ago - some still running very successfully. Instead IT dominating, IT was guiding and negotiating with business units. About half of the time did go building the business process which matched with the IT functions. Yes, hard work and you have to learn the language - not many in business understand bits and bytes, but the results were systems which are the base for todays successful business.

The article is right - SOA needs to be understood, otherwise it may show some benefits but then fall back to the same old. SOA is not technology, it is an architecture. And as long as in IT an Architect is described as someone who knows how to configure XXX SQL server, write PHP, code in C# or write a SAP module, and so on - IT has no clue what the real architecture is!

Click to read the article this is in response to.