SOA and the Laws of Unintended Consequences

SOA in Action Blog

« Begin Your SOA Journey With a Single Step | Main | SOA in Action Conference -- Tomorrow -- Be There! »

November 12, 2006

SOA and the Laws of Unintended Consequences

What is driving organizations to move into SOA these days? John Michelsen, founder and chief scientist for iTKO Software, says there are three types of SOA clients:

I recently had the chance to talk with ohn Michelsen, founder and chief scientist for iTKO Software, who said SOA implementers tended to fall into three groups. (The podcast is available here.)

1) Large financial institutions and logistics companies convinced “that they’re already fully SOA and are embracing some of the newer ideas in an evolutionary rather than revolutionary way.”

2) Others who have “renewed their efforts and their investment -- and they’ve brought the business side into that conversation, which is the difference between success and failure.”

3) Those convinced, “‘OK, I’ve got to get into this, and I’ve been reading the books that say, ‘SOA or fail,’ so I should do my part in it as well.’”

What are the major obstacles Michelsen sees to SOA implementations? First, there's the complications that arise when organizations attempt to interconnect systems that were working just fine on their own. Second are the issues that arise when service providers are on different lifecycles than service consumers. "There's always some kind of wrinkle to the high and lofty goals we have," Michelsen said.

“Systems that ran on their own just fine, once connected, start creating issues. Secondly, we’re depending upon each other and the partners, but they’re not on the same lifecycle,” Michelsen adds. “You might be an application developer within a company and I build services that you reuse. I have unintended consequences every time I change my services on you, and you have very little control, organizationally or politically over my lifecycle,” he notes.

Posted by joemckendrick in SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us