SOEA - Service Oriented Enterprise Architecture

Today I attended a Gartner Briefing on SOA just outside Copenhagen. From reading some of Gartner’s material on SOA I thought it could be interesting. Unfortunately it was not…! It might be because the briefing was intended for people who didn’t know much about SOA.

However, that aside, I don’t think that many of the attendees will be able to tell anyone what SOA is after this briefing… And if they are, it would be my guess that they would see SOA and Web Services as one and the same thing – an opinion on which I disagree, and see as a somewhat legacy view on SOA.

The sad thing was that he actually just started to talk about some of the interesting issues on SOA in the end. Here I am thinking issues as “Service life Cycle Management”, “ROI models” etc. Issues I see as a part of SOA.

So to sum op I just spend this morning being told about the architectural elements around Web Services - in disguise of the best seller term: SOA

I found a post on on ZDNet’s titled: Keep SOA projects in check with top-down guidance commented by Jason Bloomberg from ZapThink – and comment is what I find most interesting:

META is correct as far as they go, but ZapThink would go one step further. As SOA matures in the enterprise, it will become EA.[…]

I both agree and disagree with Jason Bloomberg from ZapThink. I don’t see SOA becoming EA, but I see SOA influencing and changing how to approach EA. But still; EA covers a broader concept than SOA.

EA will change with a strong influence from SOA, but SOA will not become EA - This is why I am working on the concept of SOEA. It is from uniting the advantages of EA and SOA the real value will show.

Just a little update on low level of activity on my blog.

I have been working on writing definitions on the concepts that are used in relation to EA and SOA. This, quite boring, but necessary exercise is fortunately moving towards the end, and I will be publishing my definitions shortly.

One of the reasons that the “definition work” is going a bit slow is because I am also working on a much more interesting project. I have commenced the ambitious task of trying to map SOA into the Zachman Framework! And I must say; I think it looks very promising!

Some of the preliminary results is:
In my view SOA has a great effect on EA. Often I see that the arguments of the A in SOA should be removed, and I am beginning to work with the concept SOEA (SOA - A + EA = SOEA). (and I can see that my thesis instructor might be a little inspired from our last meeting http://gotzespace.dk ).
The reason I remove the A from SOA is because I don’t see it as the same A that is in EA…

And another exiting thing is that the mapping of SOA into the Zachman Framwork may make it possible to omit the “Technology model” and “Detailed Representation”.

I will surely return with more on this later!!

The original name was rely mostly a spare of the moment decision (this might be as well :-)), bur I have decided to change the name of my Blog to SOAE that stands for; Service Oriented Enterprise Architecture.

Know I am curious to see if the concept will be as widespread as SOA and EA…