Ronald Schmelzer, Managing Partner at ZapThink gave a lively talk on SOA Futures: Growing your EA Skills and the Long Tail, at the March 2009 meeting of the SOA Consortium in Washington DC.
Schmelzer began by commenting on the inflexible, unreliable, unpredictable and non-compliant nature of enterprise systems. Next, he spoke of the real digital divide – the technology experiences we have as consumers versus at work. This divide is the equivalent of turning the clock back 10 years.
In diagnosing the problem, Schmelzer ruled out bad technologists, bad technology and inadequate investment. In fact, enterprises are quite good at design and development. The problem is not the artistry, but the engineering. We lack the discipline to build durable systems that can meet new business needs for 10 years.
Equally troubling is that current IT practices – large buy and build projects – only satisfy a small portion of business opportunities. Schmelzer describes this as the long tail of un-served business needs. The keys lie in architecture, service-orientation and optimizing this equation: identifying the smallest number of services that enable the largest number of processes in the organization.
To hear Schmelzer’s advice on applying service-orientation to engineer durable solutions and view the slides go here.
This is the seventh of eight podcasts recorded at our March meeting. Previously, we released Sandy Carter’s Smart SOA in Tough Economic Climate, Dave Linthicum on Intersections of SOA and Cloud Computing, How SOA participates in a Green World Roundtable, Cory Casanave on Enterprise SOA modeling with SoaML, JP Morgenthal on Disassembling the SOA & BPM relationship and Todd Landry on Service Oriented Communications. Next up, Mark Herring of Sun Microsystems on SOA is Dead?!?! Then, What are these Companies doing?
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