Is SOA Too Hard?

One observer I heard over a year ago observed that new Technology enables change, and new Processes are built on top of that technology, but that new Organizational structures (roles, responsibilities, right) and changed People (the mental models and narrative fragments used to turn information into action) are much more difficult challenges and require significantly more time and effort.

Over the past couple of months there's been a number of well-informed observers express worry about whether SOA is just too hard/costly to justify its benefits. This is discussed at some length in two recent posts:

• Joe McKendrick has a good summary of a recent dust-up sparked by a ZapThink missive decrying the fact that techies are simply putting new SOA lipstick on the same old EAI pig.


• And, Dion Hinchcliffe appears to be returning to more frequent blogging. He has for some time emphasized WOA as an Exploration-oriented capability and SOA as more of a Exection-oriented capability. His latest on the topic has some interesting thoughts of the desired balance between the two...and provides more evidence that the massive task of integrating stovepipes will be more bottom-up & viral than top-down & architected.

How an enterprise can create a vibrant WOA culture internally is unclear...this is the bleeding edge of Exploration with lots of fast/small failures. One enabler is making all enterprise data as widely available and mashable as possible...but that's only an enabler...it's not a catalyst. (though it's interesting that the data-centricity of WOA is consistent with previous observations I've made about the apparent trend of IT security toward relatively fine-grained wrapping of data)

Enterprises look more like the Sahara with a few vibrant oases (stovepiped functions) than the tropical rainforest of Web 2.0.

How you begin to make the desert bloom is very much an open question...you must address Technology, Process, Organization, and People simultaneously. SOA seems to be kind of like creating mini-oases, while WOA is more like installing a massive sprinkler system.

The complexity of the coupling among the POPT layers (along with the fact that Organization and People are especially tough) would point toward keeping Technology & Process as thin as possible...which is exactly what WOA does.