You never know what kind of impact a comment made at a speaking event will have. That is, unless you have 4 other SOA blogger in the audience at the time. During my keynote address on Monday at the Open Group's conference held in Austin Texas I stated that: "Five years from now, we won't be talking about SOA… It will all be folded into EA." Meaning that SOA does not change, but it just meshes with other architec You never know what kind of impact a comment made at a speaking event will have. That is, unless you have 4 other SOA blogger in the audience at the time. During my keynote address on Monday at the Open Group’s conference held in Austin Texas I stated that: “Five years from now, we won’t be talking about SOA… It will all be folded into EA.” Meaning that SOA does not change, but it just meshes with other architectural concepts that are already existing and adding value. Indeed, in some instances SOA will become EA. In other instances, EA will learn to adopt and change around SOA. Thus, in 5 years we will just be talking about “architecture.” That was core to my point. Provocative? Not really. It was interesting to read the responses from the bloggers in the audience who posted my comments, and their thoughts, before I finished my talk. Indeed, one of my clients sent me a blog posting about my talk, via e-mail, before I got back to my seat. What a world we live in now, actually kind of neat. Here are the 4 that I found. Dana Gardner “In effect, Linthicum said, SOA is just good EA. The goals for each are ultimately the same: To get better at building agile IT architectures and to make change the number one requirement for IT. But that’s not what you’ll find on the street. In many cases those planning SOAs are not in synch with those that are keeping the trains running on time, so to speak, inside enterprise datacenters. Linthicum pointed out that there are currently “two worlds out there,” enterprise architects and SOA architects, with one working up from the existing IT landscape and the other working down, respectively, from the larger concepts of agility, reuse and orchestration of service points.” I thought Dana did a good job in capturing what I was attempting to communicate. “SOA is good EA.” Thus, in a few years we won’t be talking about SOA as much as just architecture. “So what are the next steps to make EA and SOA act in concert? How can the will of the organization at large be cultivated to support the $7 million to $10 million needed for even a medium-sized business to meaningfully implement SOA? Linthicum recommends that IT leaders see beyond the SOA hype, to encourage enterprise architects to become advocates for positive change that embraces SOA principles and methods. He also says that SOA must play well with and embrace such mega trends such as SaaS, Web 2.0, application modernization, datacenter consolidation, and semantic data management.” Dana gets an A+ is coverage. Todd Biske “Right now, I’m sitting in David Linthicum’s keynote, which is on EA & SOA. He had an interesting quote, which was: ‘Five years from now, we won’t be talking about SOA… It will all be folded back into EA.’ There’s some truth to this, but there’s also a lot of risk. One of the issues with EA (and many other efforts within IT), is that it can become disconnected from the project efforts that are going on. The term most frequently used with this is “ivory tower” where enterprise architects are simply viewed as paper pushers that know how to create a lot of PowerPoint slides. One of the side benefits of SOA is that it relates very well to the world of the development projects, with “service” being the point of common language. The enterprise architects may be modeling the enterprise in terms of the services that are needed, and projects can now utilize these models in their project architecture. This is easier said than done, however, as you need to ensure that the reference material containing these models (e.g. a reference architecture) is consumable at the project level. If the only group that can understand your models are fellow enterprise architects, that’s a problem.” First of all, Todd got the quote right, and I agree with his assessment. My point is that SOA needs to work with existing enterprise architecture efforts out there. Right now, that’s not happening. Indeed, SOA is an architectural pattern that adds value to EA. Thus, EA must change to leverage the notion of SOA, and SOA must learn how to work with existing EA. More from Todd: “So, will SOA be folded into EA as a whole? If EA can ensure that the artifacts it creates are consumable at the project level, then absolutely, SOA will be folded into EA. If EA is not creating artifacts that are consumable at the project level, then we have a problem. You’ll likely still have tension between EA and SOA, and likely not being achieving the levels of success that organizations that have successfully bridged the world of EA and the project space. This doesn’t apply solely to SOA. This applies equally to any architectural domain. You may have information architects working on canonical or enterprise data models, performing data quality analysis, etc., but if it doesn’t find a way to become relevant to project efforts, it will exist on an island with continual struggles to achieve the objectives that were set out.” Tony Baer “Keynoting the Open Group’s Enterprise Architecture Practitioner’s Conference this afternoon in Austin, colleague David Linthicum made a bold prediction: that in five years, SOA would get absorbed into the discipline of Enterprise Architecture within five years. He characterized the current scenario in most organizations: that the EAs who tend to take the long view in planning what practices, platforms, and architectures should become enterprise standards, are largely speaking past the teams doing SOA projects who are concerned with meeting deadlines, delivering tactical results in manners that may at cross-purposes to what the EAs are talking.” And, went on to say: “As you might guess, my colleagues (and fellow panelists later this afternoon) Todd Biske and Dana Gardner also had a few things to say about this. Both agree that ultimately this is the goal – you can’t harness the benefits of SOA if you simply expose the same old silos with interfaces that are just a bit more modern.” And finally, from Beth Gold-Bernstein. “David Linthicum delivered the keynote, and spoke of SOA as a subset of IT Enterprise Architecture. In fact, he stated that SOA is really just good architecture. Have to agree with him there – it’s been a known best practice for decades. ” So far, so good. “Then he said that in 5 years there will be no such thing as SOA – it will just be architecture.” Nope, never said that exactly. Actually, Todd got the quote right (see above). There will always be such thing as a SOA, it will just be talked about in context of architecture. The buzzword, and architectural design pattern, will be absorbed into existing and future architectural practices. Normally Beth is spot on, but she missed the point on this one. I’m thinking my brut good looks must have distracted her. 🙂 She goes on to say: “My take is that while SOA definitely needs to be brought into the IT governance fold, it is not just an enterprise architecture issue. It fundamentally changes the way applications are developed. It’s going to be a while to transition the developers skill sets. So as a term SOA will likely stay around for a while.” I don’t think the value or the notion of SOA will go away, it will just be discussed in the context of architecture in general (Okay, I’m being redundant). So, just to be clear, I’m not announcing the death of SOA, but that it will have a core systemic value going forward….always, within architecture. Interesting in the way the bloggers took the comments, and the audience as well I’m sure. I’m glad I have a blog to respond. Software Development