I want one of those SOA thingamajiggies

MSDN Blog Postings » I want one of those SOA thingamajiggies

MSDN Blog Postings » I want one of those SOA thingamajiggies — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 21:31:57 GMT

PingBack from http://msdnrss.thecoderblogs.com/2007/08/11/i-want-one-of-those-soa-thingamajiggies/

re: I want one of those SOA thingamajiggies

Jack van Hoof — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 00:51:23 GMT

Hi Nick,

How right you are! And so simple...!

I - once again - totally agree with you: <a href=http://soa-eda.blogspot.com/2007/05/business-doesnt-ask-for-soa.html>

We are not hired to deliver SOA's to the business, but solutions. That's what they ask for</a>.

Jack

re: I want one of those SOA thingamajiggies

Casey — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 09:31:36 GMT

Funnily enough - I've usually found the opposite, it is easy to sell SOA, but damn hard to sell solutions.

SOA is a buzzword that executives and managers love, because it says "we are doing things in a big expensive and proper way", where as you try and talk about a solution that abstracts the mechanisms and deals with the messages and suddenly they get all scared.

I even had a senior Head of Information Services recently explain to me that he wanted me to stop talking about "services", they had to be "web services" and he would allow nobody to use the term "services" as he had established that SOAP was the only shared protocol in the environment, and that "web services" meant SOA.

He was deadly serious, because he had read, and completly misunderstood, some sales documents a major vendor had been selling to him.

He had sold "SOA and Web Services" to the executive, and he didn't want anyone coming along and implementing "services" that didn't care about their delivery mechanisms, as far as he was concerned the key to the whole SOA thing was SOAP and the "web".

Buzzwords are easy to sell, abstraction is hard to sell.

re: I want one of those SOA thingamajiggies

NickMalik — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 20:13:52 GMT

Hi Casey,

Wow. Fascinating. But not better.

Your VP has given the executives a false sense of security. They want to insure that their company is doing things the right way. So the VP has told them "yes because we use web services."

But it is meaningless. A developer can screw up a SOBA just as easily as he or she can screw up a client-server app... perhaps easier.

This is dangerous territory, my friend. One serious failure that stems from poor use of SOA and the executives will just as quickly turn against it as they are now for it.

re: I want one of those SOA thingamajiggies

Loraine Lawson — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 01:24:26 GMT

Maybe I'm off-base here, but I think the reason everyone gets into the details of SOA is because IT has promised to deliver this stuff - agile enterprise, lower development costs, etc - under various guises before. So, when you're trying to convince business that it's worthwhile because it will lower overall costs and provide for a more agile enterprise, they end up asking questions like, "Well, yeah, but that's what you said when we invested in this system and that solution. We've already spent all this money on IT - what's different this time?" So, then you have to explain why SOA is different - because it uses open standards and so on.

Imagine if your housing addition fell down or didn't met code or didn't meet your needs in some other way. When the architect came back and said, "We have to do it again. I thought this material would hold and it didn't." Wouldn't you ask more questions this time about his 'standards?'

The problem is, housing standards and codes have been around for a long, long time. Your architect knows what works.

With IT, that's just not so. IT practitioners are still trying to figure out what works and what doesn't work. And new 'materials' are constantly appearing. So, the solutions do get better - but you've got to convince the business. And, understandably, they have a lot of questions. You have to build a better, more in-depth case than your architect because, frankly, the results haven't been as promised.

re: I want one of those SOA thingamajiggies

Casey — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 09:22:44 GMT

Indeed Nick - in my experience, SOA is too easy a buzzword to latch on to, and out of 6 or 7 major organisations I have worked for that claimed/believed they were doing SOA ... none of them were. More importanly (or worryingly), none of them *really* wanted to, they just wanted people with the financial purse strings to think it was all 'industry standard' stuff.

I will be very happy the day bosses realise that SOA is pretty meaningless, it is just a good buzzword. Maintainable, flexible, independent and evolutionary solutions that talk to each other (which is essentially what SOA is trying to bottle into a single acronym) are something very different to what most consultancies sell as SOA ... which is in my experience, usually 'use web services'

re: I want one of those SOA thingamajiggies

Ollie — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 16:19:34 GMT

I think I disagree with your analogy Nick, if the executives are internal to the company then aren't you\we more like specialist building contractors trying to get buy-in from the architect to use a new material or building process, e.g if you were building an eco-house you might be trying to get the architect to use straw walls instead of concrete.

If the executives are external and you\we are trying to sell a product then why would you expect them to need to know the details of SOA or any other implementation paradigm, e.g. I know vaguely how a car engine works but I don't need to much detail when purchasing a new car.

Just my two pennies worth :)

re: I want one of those SOA thingamajiggies

NickMalik — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 22:52:49 GMT

@Lorraine,

Best answer I've had to a blog post in ages.

You are right. We have lost the trust of the business by promising bunk for so long.

This is part of the 'monopoly relationship in customer-focused clothing.' If we WANT to meet the needs of the customer, but the customer has no choice but to use us, no matter how crappy our results are, then we will keep promising "we will do better next time" without any real incentive to invest in figuring out how.

That said, two wrongs do not make a right. We cannot increase the trust of the business by talking about SOA when they don't fund SOA and we don't build what they don't fund.

re: I want one of those SOA thingamajiggies

NickMalik — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 22:54:25 GMT

@Casey,

Yes... The real goal is to build maintainable, flexible, independent and evolutionary solutions. I could not agree more.

SOA is the gift wrap.

--- Nick

re: I want one of those SOA thingamajiggies

NickMalik — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 22:56:55 GMT

@Ollie,

who has a better relationship with the customer: the external vendor or the internal IT department?

Do I have to ask?

When we talk to the business, should we sell SOA?

Inside Architecture — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 09:41:02 GMT

There is an interesting logic argument in the SOA community that says: IT has lost the trust of the business,