SOA Consortium Insights

December SOA Consortium Meeting in Burlingame, CA

Although I was scooped by our marketing folks, I want to brag about share, our great line-up for the Dec 12-13 meeting in Burlingame. We design our quarterly meetings for members and non-members to interact around the topic of business-driven SOA.

Our confirmed invited speakers are Sandy Carter, Judith Hurwitz and Amit Sinha.  Our Hot Topic Roundtable is on CIO SOA Concerns and features Sandy, Judith and our own Richard Soley.  Details from our press announcement:   

On Day One of the meeting, Sandy Carter, VP, SOA & WebSphere Strategy, Channels and Marketing, IBM, will give the presentation “IT needs SOA Skills,” while Judith Hurwitz, President, Hurwitz & Associates, will present “Planning for SOA 2008 by learning from SOA 2007.” Both featured speakers will join SOA Consortium Executive Director Dr. Richard Soley for a SOA Hot Topic Roundtable discussion on CIO SOA Concerns. Meeting attendees will have the opportunity to participate with comments and questions. The Roundtable will be recorded and made available after the meeting as an on-demand podcast. On Day Two of the meeting, featured speaker Amit Sinha, VP of Portfolio Marketing, SAP will present “The Business Case for Service Oriented Architecture - Business Network Transformation.”

For more information, check out the full agenda.  Registration is open to the public.  This is a great opportunity to interact with leading SOA thought leaders and practitioners in a sales-free environment.

Service Funding Models Survey

Successful business-driven SOA adoption goes far beyond embracing architectural principles and implementing services infrastructures. SOA, with its shared services and infrastructure, changes the planning, management and operational models of IT. One of these “business of IT” changes concerns the reinvention of funding and chargeback policies. Currently, this is an area with far more questions than answers. 

As a service to our members, and the broad SOA community, the SOA Consortium is conducting a survey to learn what methods and policies organizations are using, or planning to use, in respect to funding and chargeback of shared services and shared service infrastructure.

If you are actively considering or pursuing a SOA strategy, please take a few minutes to fill out our short survey.  The full survey results will be shared with the public in early 2008.  Todd Biske will discuss some of the early survey results at the upcoming Gartner AADI Summit.  Thanks!

CrossTalk Gets it Right

Credit where credit is due.  Just a couple of months ago, I took CrossTalk Magazine to task for their characterization of SOA, essentially conflating SOA and Web Services.  You may remember that I pointed out that the first full article in that issue hadn't been about SOA at all, but rather was a bald introduction to Web Services.  Just what the world needs, more middleware!  And this was an issue of the magazine subtitled Service Oriented Architecture!

I am delighted to report, however, that this time they got it right.  This month's issue,
entitled "Working as a Team," has an article that doesn't fit the theme of the issue but does characterize SOA the way we do here at the SOA Consortium.  In an article entitled "Common Misconceptions about Service-Oriented Architecture", five authors from the Software Engineering Institute explain that SOA isn't a technical concept at all.  Their list of common misconceptions is worth reading:

• SOA Provides the Complete Architecture for a System
• All Legacy Systems Can Be Easily Integrated Info an SOA Environment
• SOA Is All About Standards and Standards Are All That Is Needed
• SOA Is All About Technology
• The Use of Standards Guarantees Interoperability in an SOA Environment
• A Service Registry Allows Service Binding Dynamically at Runtime
• Testing SOA-Based Systems Is No Different Than Testing Any Other Type of System

I agree with the conclusions of the article: the fact that there are common misconceptions about SOA doesn't mean there isn't value.  In fact we have plenty of proof-points for SOA success already cataloged.  But focusing on magic bullets, especially technical magic bullets, never solved real business problems.