Not that I wanted to make this SOA vs. EA week, but it has been an interesting angle to each topic, and the bloggers continue to pick up on it. Typically, they are referring to the comments I made during Monday's keynote at the Open Group Conference in Austin. I think I've said all that I can say on the topic, so it's interesting to hear others talk about it. A few to point out: In Loraine Lawson's blog, she poi Not that I wanted to make this SOA vs. EA week, but it has been an interesting angle to each topic, and the bloggers continue to pick up on it. Typically, they are referring to the comments I made during Monday’s keynote at the Open Group Conference in Austin. I think I’ve said all that I can say on the topic, so it’s interesting to hear others talk about it. A few to point out: In Loraine Lawson’s blog, she points out: “It seems obvious that SOA would help with EA, but since SOA is still in the early stages of adoption, everyone’s still trying to figure out how SOA will fit in with EA. The answer, according to a recent white paper from The Open Group, David Linthicum and various others, is simply that SOA is an architecture that supports services and, therefore, one way to do EA. Eventually, SOA will become a core EA discipline. That makes sense.” And from Eric Roch’s blog post: “SOA should be a part of Enterprise Architecture (EA) from a top-down perspective, but there is also a lot of tactical work to be done with SOA that is more aligned with what many companies call solution or application architects. The bottom-up plumbing of SOA still has to be done and that is project based.” Finally, Tony Baer’s article, Bridging the gulf between SOA and enterprise architecture, where he states: “By and large, EAs as a group have only recently begun embracing SOA. For instance, many in this group still fear SOA as opening up the floodgates to enterprise IT assets in a manner that will be difficult to control. In effect, because SOA is supposed to make it easy, it would make it too easy to let software developers-turned-SOA project teams expose data and application functions in much the same way taking the familiar shortcuts to turning out quick results without concern for how their programs could be maintained in the long run.” I have to say I agree with all that’s being said around SOA and EA working together, and I think now is the time to find the synergy between the two. One of the dangers I see out there is the fact that the Enterprise Architects typically have more political juice within enterprises. Thus, if they view SOA as a threat, they could convince those in charge to ignore it. Or worse, say it has been assimilated into EA, when it has really just been ignored. I hope that won’t happen, but if it does, I’ll be there to point it out. I’m cutting back on my public speaking to focus more on my clients. However, I would be happy to speak at the Open Group event again, they seem to be addressing the issues around SOA and EA, by framing the discussions. That’s just healthy. Software Development