Are we Ready for an Open SOA Methodology?

As I’ve been consulting with end user organizations, I’ve been thinking methodology…approaches, steps, procedures, whatever you want to call some sort of structured approach to implementing a SOA that insures care is taken when gathering requirements, defining/designing, and selecting the right technology. Indeed you may remember 12 Steps to SOA, now broken down to provide more details.

So, for those of you who don’t remember just what a methodology is, Wikipedia defines it as:

“Methodology is defined as (1) ‘a body of methods, rules, and postulates employed by a discipline’, (2) ‘a particular procedure or set of procedures’, or (3) ‘the analysis of the principles or procedures of inquiry in a particular field'[1]. The common idea here is the collection, the comparative study, and the critique of the individual methods that are used in a given discipline or field of inquiry.”

In looking at the other SOA consulting firms out there, most have methodologies, formal or informal. All of these methodologies are different, but all with the primary value of using a structured consistent approach for many different problem domains. I would argue, however, that some of those SOA methodologies out there need some work.

With so many different methodologies emerging, what I’m proposing is that they come together as a standard “open methodology,” driven by the SOA practitioners and not just the vendors or consultants, very much like a wiki.

For instance, I open up “Steps[TM],” put it out there for use, review, and edit. Other firms who have SOA methodologies are invited to do the same. End users can pick and choose the steps, deliverables, or procedures they would like to leverage, and return there experiences back to the open method/wiki…such as “this worked well,” “this did not,” “here is the way I recorded metadata,” “here is the way I recorded processes.”

As such, the methodology evolves into something more practical and useful, with real experience behind it that’s shared among the practitioners. Other things included could be open source design tools, shared services repositories, and gateways to external Web-delivered services.

So, how do we go about doing this? First, you have to give this notion a cool TLA, I’m thinking Open SOA Methodology, or OSM. Second, set up the infrastructure for sharing, I’m thinking a wiki approach is best. Finally, put some initial content out there to get things rolling. I’m happy to do that.

While some may be tempted to toss this over to a standards body, I really think this would be much more valuable if the end users drove this dynamically, and not have this in committee after committee.

Seems like a good idea to me.