SOA and Holism

Wikipedia's definition of holism traces back to Jan Smuts

Holism ... is the idea that all the properties of a given system (biological, chemical, social, economic, mental, linguistic, etc.) cannot be determined or explained by its component parts alone. Instead, the system as a whole determines in an important way how the parts behave.

To what extent does this concept apply to SOA? My own view is that SOA needs to be understood from the Systems-of-Systems Engineering paradigm rather than from the Systems Engineering or Software Engineering paradigm. This helps us to deal with a range of system level phenomena including Feature Interaction.

In my writings I've drawn on the recent work of Christopher Alexander, from A New Theory of Urban Design to The Nature of Order, where Alexander talks about something he calls structure-preserving transformations.

According to the New Theory (or at least my interpretation of it, which I call Organic Planning) each act of transformation should be a step within a larger and open-ended evolutionary development, and should have three aspects.

1. Produce something at some level
2. Complete something (larger) that was already part-developed - typically by linking smaller (lower-level) things and peer (same-level) things that already existed, or were created in previous steps.
3. Create new opportunities - Alexander calls this hinting-at.

For example, an information service called Product Catalogue might (1) establish a single point for accessing product information, (2) linking together data from multiple legacy data stores and third-party feeds, while (3) hinting towards a new business process (yet to be fully specified) in which the product catalogue becomes a dynamic object, using some kind of real-time business intelligence.

I published a very simplified version of this in the CBDI Journal in 2004, suggesting that the service designer needed to look in four directions (upwards, downwards, sideways, inwards). I understand that this was picked up and referenced by the ArchiMate people, for example in a 2005 book called Enterprise Architecture at Work, and it has been implemented in the Telelogic tool. My colleague Tony Bidgood has recently published an article on ArchiMate, with some further examples.

• Richard Veryard, Business Driven SOA (CBDI Journal, May 2004), Business Driven SOA Governance (CBDI Journal, June 2004)
• Tony Bidgood, Archimate Standard for Enterprise Service Modelling (CBDI Journal, August 2008)

Here's how I intended the four directions to map to the New Theory of Organic Planning

1. Inwards: Functional correctness
2a. Downwards: Integrating and composing smaller stuff
2b. Sideways: Interoperability
3. Upwards: Larger whole

Organic Planning is described in my 2001 book on the Component-Based Business, and there is a short version on my website, but I didn't make this explicit in my 2004 article.

My expectation has always been that a series of transformations (whether structure-preserving or otherwise) would be expressed as a series of model pairs, in which the nth TO-BE becomes the (n+1)th AS-IS. But some alternative modelling notations (such as Michael Bell's SOMF) allow both AS-IS and TO-BE to be expressed in a single model, so it would be very interesting to see how a series of transformations could be expressed and analyzed.

Organic Planning from Richard Veryard

 

 See also SOA and Holism 2 (February 2009)