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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« In Ontario, SOA Has Been in the Works for Almost a Decade | Main | EDA, Business Driven Design, Web 2.0, Open Source -- SOA in Action! » August 14, 2007I'm an SOA Consultant, and I'm Here to Help... While it's going to take some time for most businesses to gain value from SOA, there's no question that SOA consulting itself has become a booming business. In a new post here at ebizQ, Dave Linthicum (an SOA consultant himself) probed the dark art of SOA consulting, and why consultants' promises need to be carefully scrutinized. SOA is new to everybody, so don't be sold on gobs of "SOA experience." Dave astutely observes that many past projects that consultants tout may actually have been JBOWS (just a bunch of Web services), "and have no underlying mechanisms to provide agility, which is the core benefit of SOA.... The problem is that many of people looking to hire SOA consultants don't understand the difference between JBOWS and a true SOA, and accept JBOWS as 'experience.'" Dave advises hiring "consultants who understand that SOA is really about configuration, agility, and changeability, and not just about service enablement. It's very easy to expose services; turning those services into solutions is another level of sophistication." Many consultants are a bit too chummy with vendors. As a result, Dave points out, they'll implement the same vendors and technology each and every time. Many consultants oversimplify the process, or even skip planning altogether. With SOA, there needs to be a predefined process, Dave points out. It's better to sweat it out at the beginning and get SOA right the first time. However, too many consultants have a different agenda -- "Their main focus is the selection of the technology, or, in some cases, they attempt to force fit a problem with a predetermined technology solution. This can never be good." Posted by joemckendrick in Management | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us Trackback Pings TrackBack URL for this entry: Excellent point, as with Data Governance, anyone can be a consultant right now because nobody really knows what it is. Of course, I'm being liberal by saying "nobody knows"... but it is still very new and for some its easier to hire a consultant than to learn the best practices the hard way. Posted by: Data Governance at August 21, 2007 11:42 AM Post a comment
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