SOEA - Service Oriented Enterprise Architecture

I got inspired from reading Steve Jones’ Blog-post titled: “The biggest lie in IT – Enterprise”, which in short says the there is no such thing as tool that will work across the entire enterprise.

I believe that this is spoken like a true pesimi… I mean architect
No seriously, he has a point. No product is going to solve your problems. However it might help solve your problems - if used right. The only thing that can make enterprise solutions work is YOU. And what you will probably find is that it is not the product that will be your biggest challenge – your biggest challenge is the organization.

Having a tool working across an entire enterprise requires more than the tool, it also requires that it is used in a controlled fashion. An endeavor that requires full organizational support (and power)!

The concept of SOI has become a commonly used concept – no surprise. SOA is a paradigm focusing on developing applications, and of course these applications must run on something.

What happens in most organizations is that the SOI is implemented as a part of a project, which is fine. But the real test is when the next project is to be implemented on the same SOI!

As the topic of this post is regarding the infrastructure I will focus on the technical aspects, of which some of the common difficulties a project #2 is likely to face are:

• Testing requires existing services being available for test-purposes
• Specifying the hardware requirements
• Handling concurrency
• Vendors support of standards is often marketecture and not reality
• Tweaking for performance is difficult
• Project #1 have made undocumented “shortcuts”
• Project #1 is not able to comply with the requirements of project #2
• More to come