Jeff Schneider lists the "
7 Dirty Words of SOA" and I cannot resist appending the old Dotcom-era running joke:
- Loose Coupling
- Abstraction
- Reuse
- Autonomous
- Discoverability
- Composability
- Interoperability
- ???
- Profit!!!
This is only slightly facetious though. Much SOA architecture is done without much thought for return on investment. A recent thought in the blog world is that this may be due to difference in role between the Enteprise Architect and the Business Analyst. Ron Schmelzer from ZapThink
contrasts the role of the Business Analyst with the role of the Enterprise Architect and mentions that "most BAs have business metrics in mind", and think at an "even more abstract level" than the Enterprise Architect who thinks in terms of "the Service Model and other models that relate to information, process, system, and functional flow to enable the ongoing operation of the business."
Interleaving the role of the Business Analyst with the Enterprise Architect would seem to make sense, as Joe McKendrick says: "
with SOA increasingly taken on a business or enterprise hue, BAs may now have a lot to contribute to these efforts".
A key reason is to bring in business sensibility so that architecture-for-the-sake-of-architecture is not built out. Certain SOA components (such as
XML Processing Offload) save costs, while others actually can increase costs. If this is changed, then the word "profit" (or cost-savings at least) can really replace the 7 dirty words.
