Any technology can be abused or misused. And it's certainly fair to say that an SOA isn't the answer to every problem.
But Joe McKendrick goes a little too far when he quotes Vinnie Mirchandani's blog entry about Mike Hammer's 15-year old paper on business process re-engineering.
Joe is right to correct those who blindly promote wrap and reuse or leave and layer strategies to SOA based integration and business process automation projects. After all, those strategies are only as good as the systems that are being wrapped and left.
But it is equally incorrect to characterize all wrapping as either bad or good. It really depends on the existing systems.
While it's great for Joe to remind us that the wapped systems are only as good as what's under the wrapping, the blanket recommendation to just obliterate everything and start over goes too far.
Comments (2)
Eric, Web services are extremely promising - but the cost around them is scary - see below. We get enamored with technology and with all good intentions just end up clogging business processes.
As I wrote in my entry titled "SOAk" on my blog
"So, today I get my copy of Consulting Magazine. And there is an article on SOA titled "Let's swing, Baby" which starts with "SOA promises to bring back the demand for IT professional services just like the good ole days, like client/server computing, like the e-Business frenzy"
"By 2006, Gartner predicts more than 60% of the $ 527 b IT professional services market will be related to exploitation of Web services....."
Posted by vinnie mirchandani | February 21, 2006 6:17 PM
Posted on February 21, 2006 18:17
Well let's hope this isn't the result of Web services adoption. But like any sigificant industry change it will take time to see what will really happen. The promise is of accomplishing SI tasks more quickly and cheaply, and I for one am not giving up on that yet!
Posted by Eric Newcomer | February 22, 2006 2:48 PM
Posted on February 22, 2006 14:48