Showing posts with label Service Oriented Enterprise Architecture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Service Oriented Enterprise Architecture. Show all posts

September 15, 2007

SOA – Does the Emperor Have Clothes?

Architecture and Governance Magazine, Volume 3 Issue 3, reports that one of the Top 10 Challenges in Enterprise Architecture is “Getting Ready for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)”.

- Why is SOA proving to be such a challenge?

The article reports that “most architects have not done much of either substance or significance in this area.” Further, “most of what enterprise architects have addressed in this space concerns aligning IT with the business and governance”—and this is something that EA has been doing all along anyway.

- So what has SOA changed?

“What has changed is the promise of abstracting services that can be reused.”

However, some have questioned SOA:

  1. Is SOA “just a revival of modular programming (1970s), event-oriented design (1980s), or interface/component-based design (1990s)”?
  2. Is SOA “just another term for Web Services”?
  3. Is SOA “merely an obvious evolution of currently well-deployed architecture (open interfaces, etc.)”? (Wikipedia)

Others have questioned if SOA and EA are even distinct disciplines?

“So, has SOA in fact evolved into EA? A to question to which the answer is yes and no." The author continues, “essentially there are three evolutionary paths:

  1. EA is absorbed by SOA
  2. SOA is absorbed by EA
  3. EA / SOA merge into a new concept”

Finally, the authors propose #3 merging EA and SOA as follows:

“SOA-A+EA = SOEA”

With the conclusion that “in order to create this holistic view EA and SOA must not be seen as separate disciplines, but to see the two as one will bring changes on such a scale that we are now talking about SOEA Service Oriented Enterprise Architecture.” (Journal of Enterprise Architecture, August 2007, Rasmus Knippel and Bo Skytte)

While the authors apparently seems to think SOA is important (although they call it "increasingly more abstract"), the relationship to EA is changing and unclear—Not sure this idea about SOEA is helpful at this juncture!

- How helpful to SOA development is the guidance from the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA), Service Reference Model (SRM), which talks about services and capabilities?

Not very! The SRM is supposed to “provide a high-level view of the services and capabilities that support enterprise and organizational process and applications.” (FEA, SRM). However, the service domains, service types, and capabilities listed in the FEA SRM are quite muddy, at best. Here is an example:

  • The domain of Process Automation is defined as “the set of capabilities that support the automation of process” [hasn’t every 5th grader been taught not to define a term with the same term?]
  • And it continues “and management that assists in effectively managing the business” [well that is a pretty broad definition— can’t all services assist in effectively managing the business?].
  • Then after the definition, you’re expecting some pretty extensive process automation services, but the SRM lists just 2 components:
  1. Tracking and Workflow (which includes capabilities like case management [what’s that doing here?] and conflict resolution [isn’t that a leadership skill set?])
  2. Routing and Scheduling, which includes just Inbound and Outbound Correspondence Management [so where the scheduling piece like calendaring or time management that one normally associates with scheduling and how does the routing as in Routing and Scheduling reflect the routing inherent in Tracking and Workflow category above—seems like some category overlap]

I’ll let you look at the SRM yourself to see evaluate the clarity of the other categories, but they are pretty much the same. Ok, I can’t resist, here’s one more:

  • The domain called Business Management Services, after the domain of Process Automation, actually has a service type in it called management of process {why isn’t this in the process automation domain?].
  • The other service types in this domain include Organizational Management [that includes workgroup/groupware and network management, huh?]
  • And Investment Management [ok]
  • And Supply Chain Management [which includes things like procurement, Warehousing, and Inventory Management— so why isn’t this part of back office services, like Finance, Human Capital, and Asset/Material Management?]

If this looks confusing, you’ve got my point, it’s because the FEA SRM is confusing.

- So what’s an enterprise architect to do?

Architecture and Governance Magazine says, enterprise architects need to take back the high ground here—and that must be done in 2007…today’s enterprise architect must re-engage with all the principals in the enterprise by making a case for seeing service and technology architectures as one.”— this is good advice, I suppose, but also more than a little vague!

I’ve seen a bunch of presentations (including a recent one from Department of Education) where EA has tied IT services (pretty much their IT portfolio) to requested business capabilities—again it seems pretty much like what EA is or should have been doing all along, aligning business and technology investments with a focus on reducing gaps, redundancies, and inefficiencies.

I’ve seen other people including some prominent computer and consulting vendors present this topic as well, and aside from pushing there wares, have seen them fall all over themselves tying to define and explain SOA. Honestly, it was pathetic!

Finally, I have seen one impressive implementation at a government agency, and it did actually have savings associated with it, but the application was done a few years back, was relatively small, and there has been little to no movement on further SOA development since (except for the purchase of an enterprise service bus) even though there is a mandate in this agency to implement SOA.

In fact, at a recent meeting with the business side from operations, the presenters said that they were going to spend oodles of money rewriting one (if not the) major operational application for the agency (over 1.2 million lines of code and growing) to make it .NET compliant. I asked the business if they were going to take this opportunity to do this using SOA, and they said no, they just want the same functionality as before!

So in the end, if the business doesn’t want it and the vendors and consultants can’t explain it, the final question with SOA is does the emperor really have clothes?


Share/Save/Bookmark