- Tony Montana, Scarface
Wow. All I have to say is wow. It seems that I may have touched a nerve when I suggested that quite possibly some IT professionals were responsible for their SOA failures. I got some great feedback, negative and positive and I thought this would be a great forum to address both. So here we go.
Here’s one from Matt,”
SOA is so overblown…can we please stop talking about it as a generality and instead only speak of what it actually means? There’s way too much divergence in what people mean to say whether it is good or bad at a high level.
For me it’s been pretty simple-
Applications should provide running instances of remotely accessible and technology neutral APIs, with a preference towards messaging style asynchronous integration. (as opposed to user interface, shared file, shared database, RPC, or, my favorite, no integration)
SOA is overblown and rightfully so. If everything around us in nature, our bodies, our minds, even our business models is service centric then should our applications and infrastructure is as well? Let’s all anwser this question first before we start talking about technology… then lets think about the challenges our business face:
- I ain’t competitive enough
- I can’t get products to market fast enough
- I’m a retail shop with 3,000 developers. What’s my core competency again?
Or here’s the best one-
- I need to stop buying new and reuse what I have. The government just may make me slim expenses and streamline operations if I want a part of that $700B.
Sorry Matt, great opening to your comment but the 2nd part makes too many decision makers tune out. Here’s what they read,”
For me it’s been pretty simple-
Applications should provide blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah (as opposed to blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah).
Don’t believe me ask them???
__________
The folks at moebius recursive, suggested that Gartner is a Failure and its neither the fault of SOA or the folks trying to implement it…
”It is equally important to notice what doesn’t get written: ‘We (Gartner) told you to drop everything and run after this technology previously without making sure it solved a business problem, etc’.”
I disagree here. As far back as Gartner has been writing about SOA (see research from Roy Schulte 1996), we always advised our clients to organize, analyze, organize again and then implement. But that message doesn’t seem to work with most ISV’s that insist on making their customers by “something”. As much as I would love to look at Gartner for the sole blame for SOA failure (doing so would mean that we are the prominent voice in IT in the universe), we can not make this claim… yet. IT professionals like Rich have a very loud voice in this industry and with the right dinner in the right restaurant with a few of his peers can make monumental changes in a company’s IT strategy.
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For the folks that agreed with me or were slight amused? What are you going to do next? As for being the bad guy around SOA it’s ok. We don’t mind taking the blame, but lets now do something constructive. Here’s a few things to your SOA initiatives be successful…
1 response so far ↓
1 Daryl Plummer // Dec 9, 2008 at 12:57 am
At the risk of my sanity and peace and quiet, I will enter the fray here. The IT industry has always had at least one constant. That is, the tendency for people who either sell products in it, or who implement solutions, or who talk about it – that gets the vendors, users, and analysts – all to try to rationalize why the industry almost never seems to get what it expects out of a technology. My guess would be that about 80 percent of what IT tries to implement falls significantly short of its promise. Now note I said promise, not hype. The promise is for things that can indeed be acheived, not things that were always out of reach. We generally don’t reach the promise, let alone the hype. And we all tend to blame the technology or those who advised us about it. People will often seek someone else to blame when things do not go well. We seldom look in a mirror. I do it every day at Gartner and so do many of my peers. We are not without fault, but we do try to provide insights to get to the promise and advice about how to do it and what to avoid. If we can all do a little more of that, then perhaops one day that 80 percent that falls short will become 20 – and on that day, Frank’s post on SOA will be smiling at us – and he will still be right.
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