In Austin today speaking at the 15^th Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference run by The Open Group. I did the keynote this morning.

A few notes from the conference:

• SOA is now an official EA concept, and they are thinking long and hard as to how SOA works with existing EA efforts. We covered a lot of that in the Webinar I did last week.
• They presented the Open Group SOA Framework this morning, outlining the layers they are using to layer SOA into "traditional" EA. In essence how services, service components, business processes, and service consumers all work together.
• SOA may be something that has a lifecycle unto itself, and at some point SOA may be assimilated into EA as a core discipline. I think this is true, but SOA is clearly going to have a life as a concept based on the amount of money being spent now.
• SOA Governance is a mechanism to align business value with the SOA. In essence allowing the architect to quickly align the proper services with the business processes that needs them. The Open Group is doing more work on defining SOA Governance.
• Service Lifecycle Management is something that the Open Group is addressing, in essence how you manage the lifecycle of a particular service. To me, this should be wrapped back up into SOA governance.
• They view business process as core to SOA. I can't argue with that, indeed SOA is about abstraction of service invocation and data movement back into the process or orchestration layers.
• Finally, semantic modeling is key to understanding SOA. Thus you need to create: Classification and Business Dictionary, Policies and Constraints, and Service Relationships. This goes to my methodology, but it's good to see validation.

All and all a good day in Austin.

Posted by Dave Linthicum on July 23, 2007 08:14 AM