Dilbert knows SOA

This Thursday in San Francisco we’re delighted to host another edition of the InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum, our fifth conference targeting service-oriented architecture. Subtitled “Lessons From the Front Lines,” this incarnation is rich in hands-on advice and case studies, the No. 1 request from attendees of previous forums. For those of you who won’t be there (sorry, we’re all sold out), mark your calendars for our next foray into SOA-land — a two-day extravaganza in New York on May 16 and 17.

When we launched our first SOA Executive Forum in 2005, we were excited by the technology’s potential, but frustrated by its slow rate of adoption. One year later, the picture has changed considerably. Suddenly, SOA seems to be on the tip of everyone’s tongue, bandied about in boardrooms and IT departments, discussed online, and, yes, even referenced in Dilbert.

I don’t usually rely on comic strips for IT inspiration, or for reads on the tech zeitgeist. But Dilbert is the exception. And the cartoon in question, “The Sales Call,” touches on a key issue facing SOA implementers today: the disconnect between business and IT. In the cartoon, a sales guy tells a prospective female customer, “I brought my egghead” (Dilbert, natch) “to talk to your egghead while you and I make out.” While Dilbert earnestly explains that “our Web services employ XML, SOAP, and WSDL to achieve interoperable HTTP modules,” the two sales types engage in an extended bout of cartoon smooching. In the third panel, Dilbert wonders aloud whether he’s in the wrong job, and his counterpart on the customer side tells him, “I’m not going to kiss you.”

Now, I’m not sure what interoperable HTTP modules are, but it seems Dilbert is laying the groundwork for an open SOA — an engineer’s version of free love. Problem is, the money guys have no idea what the eggheads are talking about. Dilbert likes to lampoon sales folks, but if you employ a bit of imagination and swap in conventional business types for the strip’s comical sales personnel, you’ll discover one of biggest stumbling blocks to an SOA implementation — the difficulty of establishing a meaningful dialogue between business and IT.

“Businesses don’t do SOA in a vacuum,” explains Senior Contributing Editor David L. Margulius, who wrote this week’s cover story, “SOA Planning: Sizing Up Your Business Processes.” “These days, it’s usually part of a larger business transformation. SOAs fail when the business stakeholders don’t first sit down with the IT architects and examine business processes across the organization.”

Margulius will be expanding on that theme at this week’s SOA Executive Forum, when he moderates the panel session entitled “From Processes to Services.” Hope to see you there.