Enterprise architects and SOA

Reading this article seems like a call to action for the enterprise architects to wake up. The one important reason that Linthicum fails to point out, IMHO, is that selling and implementing an SOA successfully is not only a technology problem. It’s a business problem and a people problem. Most enterprise architects approach a problem from one of the following viewpoints

• Business architecture
• Integration architecture
• Application architecture
• Operational architecture
• Development Architecture

The better the architect the more holistic the architecture solution covering a large portion of these viewpoints. More often than not, the most neglected of the viewpoints is the business architecture viewpoint. As described quite nicely by this post on viewpoint flip

Nowadays, when someone asks me what SOA is all about, I don’t glibly say “loose coupling.” I say very slowly, “It’s about being s-e-r-v-i-c-e o-r-i-e-n-t-e-d, being oriented to the viewpoint of the service consumer. SOA thinking means looking at a domain from the outside in, from the perspective of a consumer and what they wish to achieve, rather than how the domain sees itself, i.e., as a set of inter-related objects.”

Having gotten the technology/business aspects worked out, now comes the most challenging of the hurdles; the people problems; and this relates to some extent to the “Fear of change”. An enterprise architect needs to work “as” the business and not “with” the business for an SOA initiative to be successful and this also involves some level of politicking.

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