Coming from a pure IT background I certainly can understand the discussions about the " right " way to implement SOA at enterprises, but reality shows us that the right way to adopt SOA is to convince the business side regarding the necessity and contribution of SOA to the business. Let’s face it, IT is just a tool or enabler for the business to reach it goals and objectives. As a matter of fact, since IT serves as a tool to manipulate the enterprise information it always reflects the situation of the enterprise information. The enterprise information is affected by the way the business is running, therefore there is a direct influence of the business on the IT. And being based on the business means you can find a great or a bad IT architecture and then utilize it for the IT side. Still if you manage to solve IT problems without solving business problems, you’ll probably fail. We are all familiar with the IT spaghetti that all the IT knights tried to solve. But have you ever thought why we end up with this IT spaghetti? Maybe this spaghetti is a mirror of the business spaghetti! If this is the case it doesn’t matter which IT architecture we’ll follow. The right solution here is to re-architect the business side first. Ignoring the Business spaghetti makes our brave IT knight into a “Don Quixote”. People like the analogy made between city planning and enterprise architecture, so I’ll further use this analogy to prove my point here. The business architecture of enterprises is equivalent to the city planning decisions made by the city mayor and the city committee. If they have made wrong calculations regarding the distance of the city international airport from the city, it doesn’t matter which architecture the city planner will use for designing and architecting transportation and human traffic (Information), buildings (application) or roads and railways (infrastructure) the city still have a problem. Only after re-architecting the “Business” can the problem be solved. The problem that we face today is that SOA is a technical architecture pushed by the IT but not polled by the business side of the enterprise. The ironic part is that the ideas behind SOA might help enterprises business to re-architect the business side and to solve the business spaghetti. It is this business spaghetti that will prevent us, the IT guys, from attaining a successful SOA - based IT solutions. If you’re running a SOA project or thinking about one you should have an enterprise architecture team that will support you through this process. Remember, without the ability to make business changes your SOA project will probably be doomed to fail. Natty Gur
