(SOA is Dead) is Dead?

Joe McKendrick blogs about the report from Randy Heffner at Forrester about perceptions of SOA methodology (e.g. "only one percent of current SOA adopters say they have received little or no benefit from the methodology").

The key word in the paragraph above is "methodology". There has been cynicism of SOA in organizations where products such as Registries or Agent-based SOA Governance tools were put in place, but then were not used or, if they were used, did not perform. That is the fault of thinking "let's buy this product and then we are doing SOA". However, SOA is a methodology. Breaking out re-usable components, and then creating services which can actually be used by other application is the key. There is a widespead agreement that SOA is a good methodology. But throwing registries or agents at the architecture doesn't help, without this methodology in place.

The other reason for cynicism has been the proliferation of SOA "silos" within larger organization. For example, in the government area, there has been a tendency to say "SOA is great, we'll have 100 of them". And then those silo-ed SOAs do not link together. That's where XML Networking products like an XML Gateway come in, by providing the backbone for SOA. That also allows SOA methodology to be effectively applied not only in silos, but across the organization.