So, what’s missing, and required by those building SOAs. My short list is:

The big one...focus on architecture, which brings agility, and less on reuse. Agility trumps reuse every time, and we've beaten that to death here, and on my Podcast. This means focus more on the process abstractions first, and only then the notions of policy management, metadata management, and dependencies. At the end of the day, governance tools should bring some new concepts to the SOA party, as of now they don’t seem to bring much at all other than management.

Focus on the ability to leverage "stranger services." While the name may induce a chuckle, it is the best term to describe dealing with services that you have not created nor do you host. The fact of the matter is that in a few years, services created and hosted outside of our firewalls may be a larger part of our SOAs than we think, thus we need the ability the management and leverage those services.

Focus on standards, and I mean really get it done in a short period of time. Come to an agreement on standard(s) and change your products to support those standard(s) in 6 months, else don't bother. I mean how many times are we going to through the cycle of the joint press release, 6 months passes, the draft, 6 months passes, the revisions, 6 months passes, the infighting, 6 months passes, and nobody cares any more?

Vote yes, on SOA governance Reform in November, or better yet call up your governance vendor and tell him or her that you're not going to take it anymore...it's architecture that drives agility first, not reuse that drives development. Write that on your hand.

Posted by Dave Linthicum on September 12, 2006 06:25 AM