Industrialized SOA - Where are you? - Part 1

In my job I have had the privilege of working on some high profile SOA projects but more satisfyingly I have been able to see most of them through to success. This process can be rewarding but it also has its downsides and it is not (unfortunately) all Greenfields and jelly beans. In fact a lot of what I do is fire fighting and it is not easy rescuing projects on the verge of failure. You know the ones I am talking about, right? The toxic ones… the ones that no one wants to touch with a 10-foot pole. 

My wife and I were fortunate to be eating an amazing Indian cuisine cooked by my colleague Arun’s wife (some of you may know Arun from his popular blog on Oracle BPM or as the author of Oracle SOA Suite 11g Administrator’s Handbook). This catch up over great food and wine turned out to be an excellent opportunity to really talk about our passion for software delivery; perhaps much to the boredom of our respective partners.

One of the things Arun had mentioned was that he had recently been impressed by Mark Nelson’s musing about SOA Development & Delivery. As a long-time subscriber to Mark’s blog, I was keen to check it out. So after a sound night’s sleep, I was quick to Google ‘RedStack’ and here it was….

http://redstack.wordpress.com/2013/05/01/soa-development-and-delivery/

 Short

 Sweet

 To-the-point

 ….And it hit home!

While Mark did not say this directly, it seems clear to me that the SOA brand is tainted (in at least some contexts) and people are asking questions…

• Is SOA really agile when you need to wait months for a new complex feature to be released and 15 components are impacted by it?
  
  
• Does BPM really empower the business when your server goes down and the root cause is not easily discoverable?
  
  
• Is Cloud really a way to lower risk and increase productivity when the elasticity comes with lengthy periods of non-realised benefits, ramp up and confusion?

If this resonates with you, you are at the very least... not alone.

So what is going wrong? Why in some cases, is the buzz seen to be spin, to be vendor marketing; little more than bended truths?

While I obviously don’t know all the answers I’ll take a stab and say it has more to do with maturity levels and insensible decisions then the failings of SOA and its promise.

As novelist Ellen Glasgow once said “All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.” and with that I hope you’ll allow me to take this opportunity to wax lyrical on Mark Nelson’s gem by way of a few practical tips learnt in the trenches.

Click here to read the full article:

http://blog.rubiconred.com/2013/05/industrial-soa-where-are-you-part-1.html