There continues to be plenty of questions, and healthy skepticism, out there in trenches about what SOA can and should do for the business. In an interesting new post, William El Kaim talks about a new way to look at SOA, delivered in terms on which the business can readily capitalize.
He calls the concept “mySOA,”which is committed to bringing Agile, governed and sustainable business and technical services across the enterprise, and even beyond (cloud, B2B, etc.). The “my”
part of the moniker is there “because the Web 2.0 revolution will make the services more and more
used for social interactions, than for point to point conversations.” It also introduces a personalization aspect.
El Kaim says that the mySOA approach is based on three pillars: Agility, Governance and Sustainability:
Agility: “Because the business has to be agile to survive in a fast, and flat interconnected world; because our development teams are using SCRUM and moving to agile is so natural; by necessity, because the financial crisis prevented us to have a full fledge SOA project budget for several years.
Governance: “We used governance as a way to support both business and IT new forces, but also as a way to enforce collaboration and alignment. Trust was, as always, a big part of the challenge; since teams had to delegate some of their decision power and accept some rules (for the benefit of all). Agile means also that exceptions management should be part of the governance process DNA.”
Sustainability: “SOA will allow for a progressive and sustainable overhauling of functional and technical silos so as to design reusable or versatile services that will be called in various business processes. Sometimes, more than reuse, we will look for the adequate assets to provide value to the business, for an uncertain time. If we have to develop a portlet for enabling a business service to only one particular client (like a CO2 calculator), then we will do it. It could be reused or not, but should be thought to last.”
