Every now and than people approach me and tell me that they’ve read and heard so many things about SOA and are wondering “Now what is it, really ?”.

It seems like there are still too many variations in terms of what SOA is and what it means to people and that we still struggle to describe it to a broader audience.

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There’s a lot of talk about SOA and WOA led by ZDNet Blogger, Analyst and great guy Dana Gardner.

WOA is a very fast paced “Web 2.0-ish” way to innovate and mash up concepts quickly. And the massive power of it is that you are standing on the shoulders of Giants who have built “Social Utilities” and amazing Web-Oriented APIs so that you can use astonishingly simple expressions and get vasty goodness (technical term) very easily. (more…)

Since my post “SOA is Over the Sky is Falling“, I hear there’s rumors on the Internets that the chattering classes are getting impatient with limited SOA success stories. The key example is Analyst and Uber Thought Leader Anne Thomas Manes who recently noted in her blog:

It has become clear to me that SOA is not working in most organizations.

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As Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) cautiously slips out of the realm of technicians and begins to find its way into the vocabulary of the people responsible for running the business, the inadequacies of the parameters used to describe, plan, manage and measure IT in this form are becoming painfully apparent.

While IT teams now have a handle on the metrics they need to gauge the performance and benefits of services, business people are at a loss in trying to understand what the true impact and value of SOA is for the organization.

Enterprises are beginning to recognize the capacity the enterprise architecture holds for helping to align the worlds of business and IT, as it incorporates activities such as requirements gathering, expectation setting, analysis and reporting of key performance data to be used by both the IT and business into the enterprise architecture context. This has also led to SOA being increasingly understood in relation to Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) best practices.

The EAM best practices addressing SOA management include aligning the business goals and requirements with specific services, identifying where services will provide the greatest impact and benefit for the business, and various portfolio and asset management technologies. Using these methodologies, companies can match their needs, goals, requirements and expectations in such a way to ensure that current and future deployments stay on track and continually meet the needs of the business without negatively impacting IT.

This approach was strongly endorsed at the recent “SOA Days” event in Bonn, at which a number of IT leaders of major German companies confirmed their view that EAM is an absolute prerequisite for SOA.

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