Are you Building a JBOWS or a True SOA?

I enjoyed Joe McKendrick's blog where he sited a current study by Saugatuck Technology research that points out that SOA is still evolving, and that it's going to take a few years before the true value of SOA is a reality for most enterprises. Indeed, Joe goes on to say that many of the so called SOA implementations today are JBOWS, or "Just a Bunch of Web Services." Let's see, where have we heard that before?

From the study:

"However, according to Saugatuck, upon further probing, 'it became clear that many are merely managing a collection of Web services, and have yet to make a strong commitment to SOA as a management discipline — as opposed to an integration technology.'"

Truth-be-told SOA is, as I've said many times here, a true systemic change in the way you approach enterprise architecture. That's where the value is, and not just Web service-enabling you systems, or purchasing and implementing products with the "SOA hype label" bound to them (can you say governance? Can you say ESB?). It's the implementation of several layers of concepts as well as technology, custom fit to your requirements, and carefully considered given that this will be your foundation of IT going forward. Nothing more, nothing less.

So, are you building a JBOWS, or a true SOA? Here are a few things to consider:

- Are the services a true representation of the core behaviors found in your key enterprise systems, as well as new services required to provide other critical behaviors?
- Have those services been abstracted for most foreseeable uses?
- Is your information/data managed in such a way that you're loosely coupled from the underlying physical schemas?
- Are the services combinable into composites, and are those composites well defined?
- Is there a plan for governance and security, managing the use the services?
- Are both the information and services abstract-able to an orchestration/process layer for configuration-oriented agility of most of the IT assets?

I think you'll find that must early implementations of, at least the label of SOA, are actually "JBOWS." Not to worry, JBOWS can be a good start towards a SOA. Just know, you're not there yet.

Posted by Dave Linthicum on January 7, 2007 05:52 AM