SOA Retrospective

As this is my last day as a full-time employee of the CBDI Forum, I thought I'd permit myself a little retrospective discussion on Service Oriented Architecture.

My own understanding of the "service" concept can be traced back to a number of things I was doing in the 1990s, including enterprise modelling for open distributed processing (ODP), as well as early structured methods for component-based development (CBDI or CBSE). From this perspective, it wasn't hard for me to see that the service concept represented a significant departure from the software paradigms I had learned at university (everything from SIMULA to PROLOG).

By the late 1990s, the software vendors were pushing component-based development. It was already obvious to some of us that the most important thing about a component was not the internal mechanism (its implementation) but the service it delivered. I started attending meetings of the CBDI Forum, and writing for the CBDI Journal. My main focus however was not software but business - developing a business modelling approach that would link component-based software with component-based business transformation. I developed a component methodology called SCIPIO, and in 2001 I published a book on the Component-Based Business, which tried to explain business architecture in terms of business components - coherent chunks of business capability, interacting through service relationships.

But although my friends at CBDI Forum understood this, we found that a lot of people in the software industry still saw components merely as reusable lumps of software - a rehash of modular programming or object-oriented programming. What was often missing from this story was any sense of architecture. However, even at that time, a few methodologies did take architecture seriously: there were some good ideas (including explicit recognition of the service concept) in Select Perspective, for example.

By the early 2000s, people had started to talk about service-orientation and service-oriented architecture. Gradually the large software vendors got their hands on these concepts, and started to sell products and platforms into a growing market called "SOA". Lots of people started to equate SOA with these products and platforms. Meanwhile, some SOA evangelists started to make sweeping (and usually ungrounded) promises about business agility and transformation. A gap started to emerge between expectation and reality.

Some of us had experienced something similar before. In the 1980s, we had worked with Information Engineering and CASE tools, which were sold on the promise of transforming IT productivity. However, achieving these outcomes generally depended very little on the features of the technology and much more on how the technology was implemented, used and managed. I developed a technology change management roadmap, which JMA (and later Texas Instruments) used for planning the adoption of its methodology and technology into some of its larger customers.

So many years later, with my help, CBDI developed an SOA Roadmap, along similar lines, in order to help large customers adopt and exploit SOA. And in 2006, I joined CBDI as a full-time employee. One of my tasks was to help turn a considerable body of knowledge (as published over many years in the CBDI Journal) into a well-structured methodology (known as SAE - Service Architecture and Engineering).

Although my instinctive sympathies were always with the evangelists who talked about what kind of future business transformations might be possible by extrapolating the available technologies, I started to get impatient with their inability to talk concretely about business change. At the other extreme, I was underwhelmed by some of the rather narrow and uninteresting uses to which SOA technologies were sometimes being put. Regular readers of this blog will have seen me writing frequently on these subjects.

One source of growing complexity, however, is that SOA can no longer be regarded (if it ever was) as an isolated discipline. On the one hand, it tends to be combined with all sorts of other technologies and practices, including BPM, Business Intelligence, Event Processing (Complex or Otherwise), Grid, Cloud, and anything 2.o. On the other hand, it tends to be allied (sometimes awkwardly) with other architectural disciplines, notably Enterprise Architecture. And there are usually major business changes going on, such as Merger and Acquisition. Whether you are doing a technology change roadmap or a business case, you probably need to juggle several of these factors. In many situations, SOA is no longer the rising star of technology adoption but merely one of the supporting acts. David Sprott, the founder of the CBDI Forum, now sees service architecture as business as usual (BAU), saying that "the key questions to be answered revolve around the level of standardization, componentization and rationalization in business and IT" (SOA in the Recession, Feb 2009). Some SOA pundits have even suggested that SOA (or at least the label "SOA") is dead. See my post Has SOA gone for a Burton?

I have no doubt that the CBDI Forum will quietly continue applying the concepts and principles of SOA to practical business problems, unbothered by all this hype. I remain more interested in business transformation than in technology for its own sake, but I shall continue to blog here from time to time on SOA and related topics. For other topics relating to systems thinking for innovation and business survival, you may want to subscribe to my Demanding Change blog.

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Update April 2019

For many years, the Journal was available to subscribers only. Everware-CBDI has now released most of the Journal archives, with over seventy of my articles written between 2002 and 2011, as well as hundreds of further articles by David, Lawrence and others.

CBDI Journal Archive: http://everware-cbdi.com/cbdi-journal-archive

See also Lawrence Wilkes tribute (May 2017), Richard@CBDI (April 2019)