Introducing Denny Boynton: Software Coroner

Following a Burton Group analyst’s claim that “SOA is dead”, Denny autopsies SOA in this post, and assess the cause of death.   In one section, called “Morbid Obesity”, Denny talks about how (prior to joining Microsoft) he worked on a nice, useful little project that exploded as execs jumped on the SOA bandwagon: 

“Suddenly, we were trying to solve huge strategic problems with SOA. We were tasked with standardizing  processes across several departments and business units. We were talking to dozens of people about services that would standardize key business capabilities in their part of the company. We were developing taxonomies, dictionaries and registries to manage an eventual service environment. We were talking about governance standards and protocols and trying to answer questions like, “How do you get services approved for enterprise use?” and “How do you submit your service for deployment into the enterprise infrastructure?” and “What is your SLA for the service and who owns it?” and “If that group owns the service, who  owns the SLA for the underlying data?” And while we were doing all of this, we were not doing one very important thing: Designing and developing services.

“Fifteen thousand empty calories a day, and suddenly our initiative was obese and hypertensive.”

Sound just a little too familiar, anyone? ;)

Thanks to Hanu for pointing me to Denny’s post!