SOA and the technology agnost

Like I opined in an earlier post; it cannot be stressed enought that web-services is only an technology enabler not a panacea to all the worlds business problems!

 In a recent article in http://www.itbusinessedge.com titled “One Technology Does Not Fit All SOAs“

This may not be easy to do – you may need to hire additional help, either by finding a consultant or creating a staff enterprise architecture position, if you don’t have one.

In November, I asked Linthicum how companies can find qualified SOA consultants. He suggested you find a qualified architect who can guide your SOA implementation.

Now what role is such a person supposed to play? In most cases, its someone who suggests appropriate strategies/solutions that are best of breed, capable of solving the existing problem domain.

In reality, companies invest a lot of money in technology choices they make; either going J2EE route or the .net route for the most part. more than likely a that its a “solution architect” thats hired to fit the business initiatives within the confines of the existing technology investments or within the expectations of technology investments in the future.  

Can these be the same person? I think an enterprise architect would not suggest anything different from whats mentioned earlier in the same article,  and wouldn’t be wrong in doing so!

Donald Rippert outlined four phases of implementing service-oriented architecture:

1. Using XML as an interface.
2. Making legacy systems available as Web services.
3. Using an ESB (enterprise service bus) to connect Web services and use composite processes.
4. Using BPEL (Business Process Execution Language), which he notes will make it possible to change a business application by changing the process model rather than the code.

Its the “solutions architect”, responsible for each application that needs to integrate, who needs to map the proposed technology direction to the most effective implementation within his respective business domain. At the end of the day its all a matter of opinion but SOA will only succeed if its a middle-out SOA with grass roots adoption.