DoD SOA Acquisition

The SOA craze has generated massive volumes of techno-talk, moderate volumes of biz-talk, and little discussion of how to move from acquiring systems to acquiring services.

Thanks to a colleague, I just ran across a good discussion of this issue: the AFEI's "Industry Recommendations for DoD Acquisition of Information Services and SOA Systems (7 July 2008)."

What I liked in the paper:

• Mission Logic and Mission Data receive equal attention
• The SOA stack shows dependencies up and down (i.e., SLAs & Reverse SLAs)
• The need for a different set of roles/rights/responsibilities is addressed. Table 1 seems to imply that the "role center of gravity" is shifting from technology to mission...which seems appropriate.
• Appendix A is a thoughtful proposal on how to incrementally employ SOA concepts

Things I wish had been discussed more:

• How organizational structures and processes need to change to cohere with the changes in roles.
• How agile is implemented at the mission level

Figure 4 ("Evolution of Mission Capabilities via SOA") is interesting...it traces the structure of the stack from the 1960's mainframe to today's virtualized service-based open system. It shows how standardization/interoperability has moved up the stack, resulting in finer-grained plug-n-play functions that allow solutions that are more agile/adaptable. But, it seems to be mostly techno-centric...there's no discussion of how this affects the way IT, data, decision making, decision makers, and groups are woven together to complete a task or mission.