Service oriented architectures are at the stage where "everyone is having a go, even if they do not have to". This was the verdict at IDC's SOA conference in London last month, where a large majority of delegates raised their hands when asked who was implementing SOA.
No one is fooled into thinking this sea of hands translates into universal prowess on the topic.
Delegates Computer Weekly spoke to came from a range of IT departments: from the blue chip company with four years' experience in rethinking and retuning applications to services, to higher education bodies and small businesses, lacking either the funding or an obvious business benefit to justify a pilot of an SOA.
However, listening to pioneers' stories some clear themes emerged. British Energy Power & Energy Trading turned to SOA to extract more business value from its IT investments, and EBS Building Society discovered that an "SOA-like" architecture improved its dialogue with business colleagues.
Many delegates said that adopting business process modelling was a prerequisite in order to share a vocabulary that would achieve SOA implementation and outcomes. Another theme to emerge was the need to start small now and not wait for a "Big Bang" implementation.
Network provider Vanco learned valuable lessons when it extended a service to an external partner. And its insistence on the importance of an upfront investment in design was echoed by many others.
Unlike many of the technical architectures that preceded it, SOA is less concerned with complex integration issues than with governance issues. "It is all about interfacing to the object and less about the detail inside," says Steve Elliott, SOA specialist at SunMicrosystems.
For this reason, issues about how you treat a service once you get to it are more perplexing than any connectivity concerns. The big questions, says Elliott, are, "How do I know if it is a trusted service? And how do I authenticate it?"
Likewise, IT professionals have to start realising that they are moving towards a federation where the services they produce and consume may be just a part of a composite answer.
Service oriented architectures are at the stage where "everyone is having a go, even if they do not have to". This was the verdict at IDC's SOA conference in London last month, where a large majority of delegates raised their hands when asked who was implementing SOA.
No one is fooled into thinking this sea of hands translates into universal prowess on the topic.
Delegates Computer Weekly spoke to came from a range of IT departments: from the blue chip company with four years' experience in rethinking and retuning applications to services, to higher education bodies and small businesses, lacking either the funding or an obvious business benefit to justify a pilot of an SOA.
However, listening to pioneers' stories some clear themes emerged. British Energy Power & Energy Trading turned to SOA to extract more business value from its IT investments, and EBS Building Society discovered that an "SOA-like" architecture improved its dialogue with business colleagues.
Many delegates said that adopting business process modelling was a prerequisite in order to share a vocabulary that would achieve SOA implementation and outcomes. Another theme to emerge was the need to start small now and not wait for a "Big Bang" implementation.
Network provider Vanco learned valuable lessons when it extended a service to an external partner. And its insistence on the importance of an upfront investment in design was echoed by many others.
Unlike many of the technical architectures that preceded it, SOA is less concerned with complex integration issues than with governance issues. "It is all about interfacing to the object and less about the detail inside," says Steve Elliott, SOA specialist at SunMicrosystems.
For this reason, issues about how you treat a service once you get to it are more perplexing than any connectivity concerns. The big questions, says Elliott, are, "How do I know if it is a trusted service? And how do I authenticate it?"
Likewise, IT professionals have to start realising that they are moving towards a federation where the services they produce and consume may be just a part of a composite answer.
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