Comment: SOA and the portfolio

Increasingly, serious SOA efforts are about managing a portfolio. That means sorting through the corporate assets to see what should be service-enabled, what should be left as is, and what should be retired. This is all about the wider, enterprise view.

It is hard to ultimately succeed with SOA services unless you take the wider view. That view must include an understanding of the organization’s overarching goals.  SOA has a technical angle, yes. But too often, SOA advocates have sent the business owner into trances with technical particulars – WSDL handshakes, ESB performance tuning metrics or service normalization patterns.

A shared vocabulary is what is needed, writes William Ulrich, head of TSG consultancy, featured in a recent SearchSOA article on application modernization issues. He sees the term and practice of business architecture gaining definition. Check out ”William Ulrich on ‘Business Architecture’- Seeking a common language.” – Jack Vaughan