JASON BLOOMBERG, managing partner of ZapThink, was recently in South Africa to present the company's famed Bootcamp in conjunction with Real IRM. We spoke to him on where SOA (service-oriented architecture) is, where it is going, and where it stands relative to enterprise architecture.
Q: Where do we stand with regard to SOA in terms of its maturity and acceptance?
A: Note that people aren't talking as much about SOA today as they were over the last few years. That's an indication that the hype is over, and now more and more people are doing SOA, rather than talking about it. It has entered the mainstream and companies are enjoying more success with SOA.
Q: What progress are you witnessing in companies adopting SOA?
A: They're asking the right questions about governance, loose coupling, best practices and business agility, one of the major benefits SOA confers. And they're asking the right questions up-front, seeking to solve a business problem rather than adopting SOA for SOA's sake.
Q: Gartner has said SOA adoption is starting to slow. What is your view on this?
A: Anyone who can say SOA adoption is slowing down fundamentally doesn't understand the fact that SOA consists of a set of best practices.
Q: Why is the architecture aspect of SOA so important?
A: Fundamentally, SOA is architecture, and architecture creates a formalised way to deal with various business issues. It formalises how to solve business problems with IT and establishes best practices and discipline across the enterprise.
Q: What benefits does SOA confer?
A: There are many: cost reduction, asset reuse, business visibility; business empowerment; and business agility. Business agility is often the hardest benefit to justify, but it's the most important reason for doing SOA.
Q: What is the role of governance within SOA?
A: When narrowly construed, SOA governance means governance of the SOA initiative, which is critical for providing increasing value and agility to the business while retaining sufficient IT control. Broadly speaking, however, SOA governance is a subset of IT governance, which in itself is a subset of corporate governance. The big win for organisations implementing SOA is being able to apply SOA best practices for better governance overall.
Q: Which is more important: SOA or enterprise architecture?
A: Fundamentally SOA is a style of enterprise architecture and will be subsumed into it in the next four years. This evolution is taking place, and today already many SOA best practices are becoming synonymous with enterprise architecture best practices.
