SOA/EA Convergence is Coming

I’ve been thinking a bit about my post on Sunday night, specially the issues that seem to be arising between the EA community, and the SOA community. I think the Open Group’s Chris Harding did a great job in his response to my post:

“David, you are spot on with your comment that SOA and EA are both Architecture. I think the problem is that there are two different communities of architects, and they talk to each other less than they should. But there is hope that they can, and in future will, communicate.”

Okay, when will that happen, and who gets hurt in the meantime? It’s the businesses we serve, I’m thinking. Moreover, this kind of discourse could be causing more harm than good, and perhaps it’s time that we make strides to come together on this stuff sooner rather than later.

I’ve long said that service oriented architects are enterprise architects with earrings. While that’s meant to be funny, there is a certain notion of truth there. Indeed, those that focus on SOA are architects in their own right, but typically work on smaller problem domains, usually a subset of the enterprise. However, if not running the entire architecture, and have influence and resources, they can’t be effective longer term. For instance, agility won’t have that much value if you’re only making 6 out of 200 systems agile.

Thus, if SOA is a better approach than current practices, than it will indeed prove its way into the enterprises today, but will be as it should be, systemic to enterprise architecture, and not replacing it.

However, it’s going to take some rethinking and reevaluating on the part of many of the enterprise architects out there, as well as some additional work from those promoting SOA within their own firewalls. At the end of the day, there has to be a convergence, else we won’t be doing what we’re paid to do, enhance the businesses we support.