SOA Modeling Patterns for Service-Oriented Discovery and Analysis

FOREWORD

It's been a decade since the wild-eyed vision of service architectures first started to capture our imagination and five years since the global shift to service-oriented architecture (SOA) matured into a global industry of enabling products, methodologies, and services. The results? A mixed bag to be sure: Success stories abound of companies achieving dramatic gains in agility and efficiency; and, conversely, many companies that jumped onto the SOA bandwagon with ill-advised planning and governance produced scores of the same rigid, inflexible, and complex systems they had in the past. The time has come to step back and learn from experience, driven by the convergence of two phenomena: numerous successful case studies now available and a global economic downturn that brought a mandate to streamline the enterprise into a new kind of service delivery platform. "Enterprise 2.0" is "enterprise as a service," coupling SOA techniques with true business objectives.

Many people are surprised when they learn of the state of today's enterprise. Fifty years of automation efforts and trillions of dollars spent to extend, advance, and modernize the technology environment. And to what end? From an outside perspective, perhaps—it does seem to be working just fine. Stuff gets done, business happens, transactions flow, supply chains connect, and partners integrate. Well... yes, kind of.

What is the tariff being paid today in both cost and opportunity as a result of the current state of enterprise ...