Earlier this year, I stumbled upon Kim Cameron's original postings on the laws of identity. The discussion and debate was truly amazing to watch evolve. I've seen lots of posts about service -oriented
For those of you that have followed the many discussions on the SOA Reference Model email list; we've been working for awhile now to tease out the essential definition of SOA, service and core concepts (i.e. a Reference Model). We also do this where I work too.
My goal is to revisit and discuss the many facets of the fascinating topic of SOA and I hope to spark some additional debate and ideas that will help further clarify ideas related to all things SOA. So let me state, in this first post, my view of SOA.
Fundamentally, service oriented architecture is an architectural paradigm. I'll borrow liberally from IEEE to state "SOA is the fundamental organization of a system,embodied in its capabilities, their interactions and the environment so that IT assets are aligned to business needs."
As a technologist, I often want to define the world in terms of things technical. Hence, it at first seems natural to define SOA in terms of an information system (whether distributed, centralized or other). However, the system that SOA references is actually much larger - it is the enterprise itself. This means there are necessarily technical and non-technical components to SOA. What it implies is that the value of SOA comes not from a new technology push, nor from a business process re-engineering, but the combination of technology and business value. This really is nothing new, but the mechanisms to experiment with the power of this concept are more readily now than they were before.
One of the other reasons that I wanted to begin to record my thoughts on SOA were the often repeated email exchanges I have with colleagues regarding the definition for 'service.' I mean, if SOA is a service-oriented architecture, should we have consensus on what a service is? Here's what can really open a can of worms. I don't believe a service is a thing. A service is an act.
A service is the performance of work for someone else.
Such a short definition that goes so against what my background in software tells me. I propose that we're struggling to reach consensus on the definition of service because I believe that we're trying to reach consensus on the wrong thing.
I'll leave this first post with that as food for thought and return to this shortly.
2 comments:
I wonder if you have concluded that the laws of Identity are incomplete in that they pretty much ignore B2B scenarios which are actually more important than the consumer nature they speak of.
Actually, I was looking at the emergence and evolution of content based on discussions, comments and blogging in general.
The conclusion that I did reach is that we need to be careful in examining our assumptions about complex topics and recognize that just because something crops up in IT doesn't divorce it from the actualities of the world outside of IT.
I was impressed with your posts on Enterprise Architecture and Portfolio Management. Before I answer your actual question, I'm going to go back and look through the thread again.
Post a Comment