This week in links - week 20, 2008

"Does ‘SOA lifecycle management’ say it better than ‘SOA governance’?" by Joe McKendrick

These and many other issues were explored at Software AG’s SOA Governance Summit held this week in New York. I had the chance to stop by, and one current
that ran through the event was the thinking that perhaps the industry needs to shift away from the term “SOA governance” — which evokes images of nasty things like control and restrictions — and start referring to it as “SOA lifecycle management.” Will that stick? SOA lifecycle management could be acronymized as SLIM — which evokes images of unwieldy, sprawling service creation and management being streamlined into a nice, manageable process.

Forrester analyst Mike Gilpin planted the seeds for the terminology change, a theme echoed by other speakers throughout the day. However, the bottom line, Gilpin observes, is the fact that “business is still frozen in a mess of technology silos.”

"SOA and the Emperor’s New Clothes" by Loraine Lawson:

For some time now, I’ve been biting my tongue to keep from asking SOA experts one question. A few weeks ago, I couldn’t stand it anymore. Right in the middle of an interview with Miko Matsumura, the vice president and deputy CTO at Software AG, I broke down and blurted out:

'It’s starting to feel like SOA is the famous emperor who thought he was wearing fine threads and in fact he really had no clothes. What would you say to the CIO who is starting to wonder, SOA or any of these three-letter acronyms, are they really wearing any clothes?'

Part of the problem, according to Matsumura, is that we actually have two working versions of SOA. There’s what he calls “Legoland SOA” or Little SOA – which is focused on components – and Big SOA, which is what you get when you add in business process and Web-oriented technologies. Big SOA can be a strategic tool. But, human nature being what it is, people are loathe to give up their little fiefdoms and so, in practice, we wind up with “Little SOA” - pieces and silos, rather than a new strategic architecture. In this climate, SOA becomes “just” something that’s done within IT and never realizes its transformative potential.

"Relating Master Data Management to SOA" by Chris Madrid:

Service-orientation has quickly been adopted for the purpose of abstracting backend complexity from actionable interfaces, LOB applications, and business partners. Once the Service Façade pattern has been applied, backend optimization for performance and maintenance becomes possible. MDM is one technique to assist in that optimization. Existing services are easier to maintain and will perform better. New services will be easier to develop and will become trustworthy to the business without the need for time-consuming data mapping activities.