Earlier this month, Burton Group Analyst Anne Thomas Manes created a stir amongst the SOAerati (like digerati only SOA focused) by blogging that SOA is dead. Anne’s blog generated a firestorm of comments and she has since clarified her remarks.
I am in the rather odd position of disagreeing with nearly every element of her argument, except her conclusion.
Her first premise was that the current economic recession has wiped out SOA. To that I say, impossible. Bad business ideas cannot survive a good macroeconomic environment, but good business ideas can endure any type of economic cycle. The railroad, automobile, telephone, and Internet were all profoundly new and inventive ideas which survived economic downturns by becoming indispensible for consumers and organizations alike. These new ideas were profoundly better and impossible to kill because their real value became so significant and so clear to so many.
For a recession to kill SOA, it must be a bad idea. So is SOA a bad idea? In my opinion, no. SOA has just failed to make the successful transition from invention to true business innovation. The only way this transition will happen is if and when the SOAerati let the idea behind SOA be taken on by others…. people who do not care about abstract ideas for their abstract elegance…meaning business people. SOA and its concepts are good ideas in the hands of the wrong people.
Anne blogged, “Business people no longer believe that SOA will deliver spectacular benefits….” To mangle an oft quoted political phrase, I know business people, SOA is not a business idea, business people have never heard of SOA – and nor should they have to.
Business people do not need or want to know about theoretical, highly abstract ideas that are removed from real business utility. Furthermore, business people do not think inside out as most SOAerati do, they think outside in. They think about accelerating supply chains and distribution systems, delivering more value to customers, reducing operational costs, innovating for product differentiation and not about “angels on a pin-head” IT architectures.
Lastly, I agree with Anne’s conclusion. Yes SOA is about services and it always has been. Everything else around SOA has been entertaining, but ultimately diversionary chitchat (and very confusing to business people). So SOAerati, please build services using great IT architecture (secretly please), but think outside-in, and use the innovative idea that SOA represents to deliver business innovation to your organizations and stop debating IT architectural theories.
Perhaps this will ultimately help SOA (or whatever it evolves into) start pulling itself out of the nadir of the trough of disillusionment (Gartner Group term that is used in their Hype Cycle technology adoption framework) by transitioning from invention to innovation, by connecting itself to real business people and directly to business goals. Yes services without proper architecture will be an IT mess, but IT architecture without immediate business value will be vapor.