Architecture

Architecture — 1 Comment
24
Aug 09

SOA: What’s in it for me? Part 3 of 4: The “Data Folks”

This is Part 3 of 4 posts in response to a question from a former cohort, Chris, from the old days at a giant semiconductor company:

“Any thoughts on communicating just exactly what SOA is to mixed audience of technical and non-technical folks, and how it will help them?”

Before I get to the problem at hand, I will assume that you have read part 1 and part 2 of this series on selling SOA to the business and developers respectively. That is to say, I am not going to focus on anything other than the value proposition of SOA with respect to data.

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Architecture — 1 Comment
20
Aug 09

SOA: What’s in it for me? Part 2 of 4: The Developer

This is Part 2 of 4 posts in response to a question from a former cohort, Chris, from the old days at a giant semiconductor company:

“Any thoughts on communicating just exactly what SOA is to mixed audience of technical and non-technical folks, and how it will help them?”

In the first post, SOA: What’s in it for me? Part 1 of 4: The Business, Bill discusses how to deal with business folks when it comes to SOA, which boils down to:

“Never sell SOA to the business outside the context of a business problem that needs solving.”

Of course Bill provides many other tasty nuggets so if you missed his post, I recommend heading over there first. In this post, I will be talking about SOA from the developer’s perspective.

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Architecture — 1 Comment
18
Aug 09

SOA: What’s in it for me? Part 1 of 4: The Business

In response to our post “What to expect” our former cohort Chris from the old days at a giant semiconductor company posed the question:

“Any thoughts on communicating just exactly what SOA is to mixed audience of technical and non-technical folks, and how it will help them?”

Yes Chris, yes we do have quite a bit to say on the subject. In a previous post we talked about SOA being a means to a end which implies that SOA is an architectural response to a bigger need or problem. The worst thing you can do as an architect is to attempt to sell SOA as SOA. The equivalent mistake would be to try to sell Model/View/Controller (MVC) or Event-Driven architecture (EDA) to a business analyst or end-user. Either they will not get it or they will not care or both.

A better approach is to present the problem at hand, describe how the problem can be solved in conceptual terms, and then and only then illustrate how SOA (assuming it does) provides the design to solve the problem.

Having said that, this is part 1 of 4 posts on how to explain SOA to an organization.

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Architecture — 1 Comment
5
Aug 09

Who said SOA was the answer?

In “SOA is Like a Vacation” Brandon blogged on the notion that ESBs may, or may not, be part of an SOA which I agree with. In this blog I will go one step further and say that if I were you, I would question why implement SOA at all.

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Architecture — 4 Comments
4
Aug 09

SOA is Like a Vacation

It’s rare to be in conversation about SOA without someone mentioning ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) or similar (message bus, service bus, etc.). Certainly there is nothing wrong with this if the discussion is focused on the implementation of a ESB. Unfortunately, rarely is this the case. Why should this matter?

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