SOA Trough of Disillusionment: Sinkhole or Poser Filter?

It looks like we are squarely, predictably, and self-fulfillingly in the SOA Trough of Disillusionment. Analysts and press are (enthusiastically) ringing the death knell for SOA as they redirect their short attention spans to the next silver bullet/victim.

I say good. Good riddance to the droves of hypesters, amplifiers and marketing managers that couldn’t stop themselves from slapping a $OA label on anything or one that recognized http or used an angle bracket.

As for the rest of us, those who “get” SOA and its true value proposition, it is time to reclaim SOA.  To start, we need to remove the large obstacles on the SOA business value path.  I’m thinking we (as an industry/community of communities) need to tackle the following:

1. Let’s once and for all, clearly, succinctly, and in business terms articulate the ‘what and why’ of SOA.

Hints:

• SOA is not the underlying technology, e.g. Web Services, SOAP, REST, ESB…
• SOA is about enabling organizations to create, and adapt to, change. 

2. Let’s identify (and act on) real business problems and opportunities SOA enables and use those as starting points to engage business folks in a value conversation.

3. Let’s create and use reasonable, integrated, methods to define and deliver solutions that actually represent the intent of business strategists and process owners.

4. Let’s break though the artificial constraints of vendor packaging and research taxonomies and connect the dots between SOA, BPM, EDA and Web 2.0 in the spirit of delivering business value.

5. Let’s figure out an Agile way to implement a SOA program that:

• Delivers business value at each step
• Grows skills, competencies, and buy-in of internal IT and business professionals
• Builds out a SOA environment in an incremental, sustainable, scaleable and malleable manner
• Deliberately accounts for SOA’s impact on IT Service Management

6. Let’s consider, plan, measure and report on SOA in the correct perspective, as a lifestyle change that encompasses people, process and technology.

Any takers?

Comments

[Sandy Kemsley]

That's the advantage of any trough of disillusionment -- it shakes off a lot of the snake oil. Don't worry, they'll be back when SOA climbs back up to the plateau of productivity. :)

The focus on business is critical, as you point out: time to start making this generate measurable benefits for the business instead of being another IT sinkhole.

[solidpoint]

I'm heading up to Redmond at the end of Oct for MSFT's conference on SOA. I hope you will be there. My expectation and hope is that if MSFT can demonstrate a SOA based on a completely different set of protocols than is commonly used, people will finally get that SOA is not about the alphabet soup, it is an architecture that can, if used properly, allow IT to support business initiatives rather than babysit yesterday's techno-hip de'jour.

Technology for technology's sake is what losers - who don't want to be bothered with understanding the business their company is in - do until someone tracks them down and fires them for their utter uselessness.

[Anil John]

Amen, Sister! :-)

[Neil Ward-Dutton]

Bravo, and well done for getting so many links into one post! There's got to be some kind of award for that alone... :-)

[Tim Bass, CISSP]

Hi Brenda,

If you look into the myriad security issues associated with SOA you will find that the slow adoption by users is more than an "SOA Trough of Disillusionment." SOA is simply too complex for most organizations, from a security and risk management perspective.

Yours faithfully, Tim