SOA Success May be a Social Issue

SOA in Action Blog

« How Farm Credit Turned Its Silos into a 'Pinwheel' | Main | Business School Award Recognizes the Business Side of SOA »

February 05, 2007

SOA Success May be a Social Issue

Increasingly, integration action is taking place on the browser level. This may require an adjustment in SOA priorities.

My colleague over at the ZDNet blogging community, Dion Hinchliffe, has just posted advice on his own site which suggests that SOA success lies in something called "Reed's Law" (and links to the definition here). Reed's Law states that "the intrinsic value of a network is much, much higher if the network is used in a social manner." Thus, Dion observes, "in some important way, social networks tend to more fully leverage the value of networked applications and services."

With this is mind, Dion provides some pointers to increasing the chances of success for SOA. Here are a few, several more can be found at his site:

Make services consumable in the browser. The browser is where a lot of the integration action takes place, and if a service can't be easily consumed in the browser, the consumer is forced to "build and maintain adapters or using a JavaScript SOAP stack -- if you can find one -- before the service can be used," Dion points out.

Use Ajax as the face of your SOA: As Dion stated above, it pays to keep service consumption within the browser. "The browser model, with our newest high-speed corporate networks, fast desktops, and latest browsers, has finally becoming a very capable way of distributing software and associated updates."

Monetize your SOA: SOA rarely delivers short-term gains, and often can be a money loser in its first few years. That's why Dion recommends that SOA deployers "figure out ways to meter usage, institute chargebacks, and even charge outright fees to external trading partners and customers allows the necessary negative feedback to discourage irresponsible or profligate use of services."

Leverage the "Global SOA" (Web 2.0, that is): Dion observes that he's increasingly coming across "impressive applications that marry the datasets contained within enterprises with the incredibly rich landscape of information out on the Web. And they are primarily impressive because of the data brought in from the Web." Dion correctly observes that "it simply no longer makes sense to have an SOA that does not have access to the Global SOA on the Web where hundreds of high-value APIs are available and millions of lesser ones in the form of RSS and ATOM."

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