SOA in Practice

Preface

I NEVER PLANNED TO BECOME A SOA EXPERT. I WAS A TEAM LEADER IN A DEPARTMENT WHICH WAS instructed to use the new service-oriented architecture approach to communicate with the systems of other departments and business units. A cross-departmental SOA team had provided a SOA concept, including thousand of pages of documentation, several frameworks and libraries, and some sketches of corresponding processes. All we, as a business unit—which had its own IT—had to do was use these solutions to establish SOA.

Once we began the project, things turned out to work less smoothly than we had expected. While dealing with the SOA approach, I not only learned what SOA is, but also learned about the differences between theory and practice, which Laurence Peter “Yogi” Berra perfectly describes as follows:

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.

In fact, I complained so much about what was provided by the central SOA team that finally I was given the task of cleaning it up. My brief was to ensure that my manager wouldn’t hear any more complaints about SOA from the business units.

So, we fixed misconceptions and broken processes, automated manual efforts, influenced strategic decisions, provided support, and (last but not least) taught others about the concepts and ideas behind SOA, and about the reasons and motivations for our specific architectural decisions and policies.

These days, the SOA landscape we built provides support for processes distributed between ...