SOEA - Service Oriented Enterprise Architecture

Working in the world of IT are you of cause very familiar with the extensive use of acronyms. And you have might also have experienced naming a concept or project something that made up an acronym so unfortunate that you had to change the name.

Making Service Oriented Systems, or in short SOS… (Try and google “Service Oriented Systems” )

I was chatting with a CIO the other day and asked him, “In retrospect, do you think you were involved enough in the early stages of your ERP implementation?”

He answered, “In retrospect - no - I wasn’t involved enough. Had I known the size of it I would have definitely gotten more involved.”

I followed up with, “Are you aware that an enterprise SOA roll-out will be significantly larger than your ERP implementation?”

He started laughing; he thought I was joking. My face didn’t change. He quit laughing. “Jeff, are you serious?”

“Yes, I’m very serious. SOA is a complete overhaul impacting how systems are analyzed, designed, built, integrated and managed. And not just some systems - all systems including packaged applications like ERP.”

I simple love this quote by Jeff Schneider. It really says it all; if you don’t approach SOA respect your ship will go down…

I simply have to quote Dave Welsh for this one:

Business is from Mars, Technology is from Venus.

I believe it says it all. It will be a continual struggle to get these two worlds to come together. It is not impossible, but I think we need a good broker

EA was an effort to do this from the business perspective, and SOA was an effort to do it with a more technical approach. Will the solution the be SOA - A + EA = SOEA

All the sales pitches I have listed here on my blog won’t come by them selves they require hard work. However I believe if you approach SOA with respect it is possible to get the promised benefits. The key lies in not seeing SOA as a “stand alone” project, but to integrate SOA closely into to your EA program – Stated by Gurpreet S. Pall on his presentation on the TechEd in Malaysia 2004: “If you don’t do EA, you can’t do SOA.”

But what still remains to be answered is how to integrate EA and SOA! SOA will fundamentally change how to approach IT within the enterprise; hence also change how you approach EA.

If you have stumbled upon other sales pitches than the ones I have pointed out please feel free to comment.