I’ve been involved in a lot of discussions about SOA and the mainframe recently, and it occurred to me that you might enjoy this perspective on it.
Of course, you’ve probably read my blog about “How to Talk Like a Mainframer” at http://community.ca.com/blogs/execio/archive/2008/11/24/how-to-talk-like-a-mainframer.aspx that I wrote this past November. But one TLA I didn’t mention in that blog was SOA.
Now, over the past year, I’ve discussed SOA in presentations I’ve given around the world, and one question I’ve asked my audiences is, “How do you pronounce SOA?”
And I always get a majority voting for either “ess oh a” (i.e. spell it) or for “so ah” (i.e. rhymes with “boa”). But I can never predict which they’ll choose.
I used to think I knew how to pronounce it, after getting a copy of the book “Service Oriented Architecture for Dummies” (ISBN 0-470-05435-2), a very useful guide, which at the outset prescribed the “rhymes with boa” approach. Life was good.
Then I went to Poughkeepsie. Now, as you may remember from my November blog, the folks in Poughkeepsie like to spell things (like “CICS” for example). Well, a bunch of CA mainframers and I were invited by IBM to get an update on their mainframe strategy, and one of their presentations was about SOA. And I was shocked by what the presenter told us.
He said that we must spell it, because “SOA” (rhymes with “boa”) is a word that means… er… VD (sorry – couldn’t think of a sufficiently obvious euphemism) in a European language.
Now, for some reason, I thought he said a Nordic language (you know: Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish or Icelandic). So, I went around spreading the word (just the word, mind you) that we were to spell it, not pronounce it, to avoid a certain discomfort.
Then I went to Sweden.
So, here I am in Sweden, presenting to a Nordic audience, and I get to the topic of SOA. And I have to open my big mouth and ask them, “Is it true?”
“No.”
Uh… not in any Nordic language?
“No.”
So, now I’m in Warwick, England, talking to my buddy Marcel from the Netherlands and I mention this embarrassingly rash assertion I’d been making, when he corrected me. In fact, “soa” does mean that – in Dutch! But, don’t worry, he says, we don’t mind. Go ahead and spread the word that pronouncing it to rhyme with “boa” is OK.
So, I’m listening to the industry experts and various executives present about it, including people from both IBM and CA, and guess what? There’s no predicting whether a given presenter will spell it or pronounce it.
Which, by the way, makes “SOA” the perfect TLA.
Why? Because TLA has two meanings: Three Letter Acronym if the three letters spell a word that you can pronounce, and Three Letter Abbreviation (see my July 24, 2008 blog on the topic at http://community.ca.com/blogs/execio/archive/2008/07/04/tla.aspx) if you just spell it. Well, apparently, SOA is both!
So, the last question then is, do you care? In other words, is SOA something your organization is looking at seriously enough that you’ve evolved a corporate standard way of pronouncing it, or at least a debate about it?