SOA - Needs Control

[OwenPettiford]

I was sent a link to this article on SOA by a friend and I think it brings 2 things in to focus for SAP customer :-  1) Doing SOA on your "own" is going to be a very hard job and a big benefit of being an SAP customer is that SAP is creating the services, SAP is providing the infrastructure (no vendor finger pointing) and SAP is providing example SOA applications. All of this will help to a) reduce costs and b) provide a ready made framework to govern within  2) If we give organisations all this flexibility and agility someone needs to be in place to make sure that it gets used in the "right" way.   This is where I see a key role for the Business Process Expert. This is the person who understands what the heck the Enterprise Architect is talking about, can help the business to put their ideas into some logical form and talk to the techies about making it happen.  It is no longer acceptable in a SOA world to either hide in techie land or take the "business" high ground....without both you really are just wasting your time and money.