Joe McKendrick, ebizQ's SOA in Action Blogger, is a nationally published author and consultant
with deep knowledge and insights regarding trends and developments in
the technology industry. He is a contributing editor to a number of
national and international publications and Websites including
Database Trends & Applications, ZDNet, and Webservices.Org. He also
serves as analyst for Evans Data Corp., and is lead analyst for Evans'
Web services and enterprise development management issues surveys.
SOA in Action Blog
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« BT's Big SOA: 'It's All About Customers, Not Operations' | Main | Are Mashups the New Face of SOA? » May 19, 2007Fight SAA (Service Averse Architecture) with Lifestyle Changes What can an organization do to free itself from "Service Averse Architecture" and move more boldly into the Service Oriented kind? Through a good diet, lots of exercise, and changing bad behaviors -- figuratively, that is. I recently had the opportunity to join Anne Thomas Manes (Burton Group) and ebizQ's own Elizabeth Book for an interesting chat on the reasons why companies end up with SAA, rather than SOA. (Podcast is here.) Unfortunately, as Anne noted, SAA is the "status quo." Elizabeth recently blogged about SAA, defining it as an architecture that is built without having first consulted the people who will use it, is unreliable or does not deliver on its promise, is so secure and complex that it discourages people from using it comfortably, or is so insecure that its data is compromised, corrupted, lost or stolen. The root of the problem for organizations stuck in this rut is that they treat SOA on a project-by-project basis, rather than as an enterprise effort, Anne said. "You can always supply service oriented architecture concepts and principles in every single project that you do. The thing is, if you're only doing so on a project-by-project basis, then you're not going to get significant value out of it.. You're just going to get small incremental value -- and that's not necessarily a bad thing. But if you really want to do service orientation, you want to reduce the redundancy that you have in your environment, reduce the number of systems that you have to integrate. You need a cross-project perspective to figure out where your priorities are and what it is you need to do first." However, not every IT department or enterprise is ready for the kind of changes SOA requires or brings about. Just as lifestyle changes are often necessary to improve one's health, enterprises and their IT departments may also need "lifestyle" changes to successfully leverage SOA, Anne noted. "I think of SOA being a lifestyle. You have to start thinking in a completely different way if you really want to make your systems more agile and more flexible." Part of this lifestyle overhaul is to think in terms of business needs, not technology needs. "You have to work with various folks in the business organization, to understand what the business is," Anne said. "What are the things that the business has to accomplish? Then you figure out how IT can support it." Click here for access to the full podcast. Posted by joemckendrick in SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us Trackback Pings TrackBack URL for this entry: SOA and SAA do have their own flaws which are affordable once looked closely. Everything changes, every system changes even man has changed through evolution. So there isn't a reson SOA must not change in terms of IT and other requirments. Posted by: Mcgill at July 19, 2007 11:15 AM Post a comment
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