Relationship Therapy – SOA and IT
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- SOA (Anthony Bradley)
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- The Therapist (Roy Schulte)
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- IT (Susan Landry)
This morning’s opening keynote was a bit of a surprise to all of us. Rather than a traditional preesentation, the session took the form of a role play between Anthony Bradley as “SOA”, Sue Landry as “IT”, and Roy Schulte as their “relationship therapist”. At first the dynamics of the role play took a bit of getting used to. It felt like it was going to be about ‘feelings’ and become too much of a touchy feely thing that felt like a soap opera – and I’m not a soap opera or sappy movie fan. However, as the session played out, the analogy really held true and was very eye opening.
The key points that came across in a very engaging way were:
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People question the “value of SOA” all the time. Just as there being good and bad relationships between people in regular life, it turns out that there are a large number of both SOA Successes and SOA Horror Stories. The key is taking the time on the “softer issues” such as SOA Governance and How to Organize for SOA. It is also critical to hit the “value cynicism” head on by really nailing SOA Business Cases.
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Individuals in a relationship often need to work on being more mature in general. Application organizations need to mature in general, not just specifically for SOA. Make sure to check out the sessions on Application Governance and Maturity
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My favorite moment was when Sue mentioned that SOA had been around for quite some time and was still having issues – just like a boyfriend that had been hanging around for too long. Roy made a great point about how SOA has significantly evolved from the early days of basic reuse and request/reply concepts. On that note, check out the Delivering on Advanced SOA Track and particularly the sessions on Event Processing and Context Delivery Architectures.
As a final point, the notion that every IT organization’s journey with SOA is as unique, rewarding, and challenging as any serious relationship between people is a great thing to keep in mind. There is tremendous value here, but we do all have to work on it. We need to make sure we are focusing our time on the right things…every day – just as therapists are want to say!
1 response so far ↓
1 Anthony Bradley // Dec 8, 2008 at 4:56 pm
Indeed, we knew we were taking a risk here and we were very careful in trying not to be too “cheeky” and deliver hard hitting content. I had three main goals with the keynote; 1-Having the audience take away that working with SOA is a lot like a relationship that requires nurturing and working on good behaviors (the role play seemed like a risky but good way to make that stick) 2. Introduce the major themes of the confernce in a holistic single thread story, and 3. Provide a single reference presentation for the major points of how to build that good relationship with SOA. I hope we achieved those goals. I’m love feedback on how it resonated.
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