07.23.07

Will SOA Get Absorbed by EA?

Posted in Enterprise Integration, SOA & Web Services at 4:51 pm by Tony Baer

Keynoting the Open Group’s Enterprise Architecture Practitioner’s Conference this afternoon in Austin, colleague David Linthicum made a bold prediction: that in five years, SOA would get absorbed into the discipline of Enterprise Architecture within five years.

He characterized the current scenario in most organizations: that the EAs who tend to take the long view in planning what practices, platforms, and architectures should become enterprise standards, are largely speaking past the teams doing SOA projects who are concerned with meeting deadlines, delivering tactical results in manners that may at cross-purposes to what the EAs are talking.

In essence, SOA project teams are simply exposing services from the silos that already exist, whereas EAs say, rethink those silos so you don’t end up reinventing the wheel in the future. It’s an argument that we’ve been hearing since the days of component-based development.

As you might guess, my colleagues (and fellow panelists later this afternoon) Todd Biske and Dana Gardner also had a few things to say about this. Both agree that ultimately this is the goal – you can’t harness the benefits of SOA if you simply expose the same old silos with interfaces that are just a bit more modern.

But both see a few roadblocks in the way.

Biske pointed to the degree of risk, that EAs are often derided as “paper pushers” who are often disconnected from the reality of what’s happening at the project level. Biske places onus on EA to create usable assets that can be consumed at project level, but he adds that’s the challenge that EAs face with any of their creations: to become relevant in the real world. Gardner added that both sides are working toward the same goal: making the organization more agile, but that “in many cases those planning SOAs are not in sync with those that are keeping the trains running on time.”

While we’ll have a lot more fun with this later today, what’s funny is this reminds us exactly about another message we’ll throwing out before a BPM audience at OMG’s BPM Think Tank in a couple days: The BPM folks believe that the SOA folks don’t understand what really comprises a business process, whereas the SOA folks feel the BPM folks have no idea what it takes to make things execute.

In this case, just change a few nouns and adjectives: the SOA project folks know nothing about what SOA really is, whereas the EA folks have no idea how to make it all work.

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