daihozen

A few days ago, David Diamond posed a deceptively simple question on one of the LinkedIn Group sites (SOA SIG) - "Can Anyone Explain SOA In Simple Terms?" The barrage of widely varying responses that followed was, in a way, an eloquent answer to that question! I've had my own take on SOA for quite a while now, so this gave me the opportunity to validate my model against what other practitioners had to say. And I must say this: I'm more convinced than ever that the industry is horribly confused about SOA. There are those whose understanding of SOA is at a purely technology level (even some of those who profess to understand that SOA is not (just) about technology). And there are others who may understand SOA for all I know, but whose explanations tend to be couched in so much jargon that they're really hard to understand. In hindsight, David Diamond could not have asked a more insightful question. Well, this is my blog, so just as history is written by the victors,...

As announced earlier, the workshop that we (my business partner Rahul Singh and I) organised on "Dead Simple SOA" took place yesterday (Saturday the 8th Dec), and here's what we learnt from it. Fundamentally, the ideas we are trying to popularise are seen as useful and worth pursuing. That was a very welcome piece of validation. However, we do need to refine our message and target our audience better. We got largely positive feedback from the two participants (the low registration rate is itself a symptom of poor messaging and targeting), but also some valuable feedback on how we could improve it. 1. There are two sets of messages in the workshop, and this dilutes its appeal. This is because the draft white paper on which the workshop is based (" Slicing the Gordian Knot of SOA Governance ") itself deals with two separate (though related) themes. One theme is "How to do SOA". This had a number of new and useful ideas that the participants commented fav...