In his ZDNet.com blog, Dion Hinchcliffe takes issue with my most recent IEEE Internet Computing column, entitled The Social Side of Services (PDF). He even emailed me a pointer to his article so I wouldn't miss it, which I greatly appreciate. I sincerely appreciate Dion taking the time to write his comments, and in general, I always appreciate any and all feedback on my columns. Below are my comments on his comments.
Dion says:
Vinoski is recommending social approaches to selling and marketing a SOA internally, yet not addressing the core problems that hinder adoption. He does highlight the usual suspects: not be [sic] aligned to the business or failing to have a registry, two classic solutions that many would agree don't help solve the problem when stated this way.
First, my article didn't say that failing to have a registry is a key problem. What it said was that believing that deploying a registry will solve all your problems is itself a problem. In other words, I said that many fall into the trap of believing that if they just deploy a registry, folks across their enterprise will just start adding reusable services to it, and your SOA adoption problems will be solved. Ain't gonna happen.
Second, Dion says I didn't address the core issues that hinder adoption. This assumes that everyone knows and agrees on what those core issues are. Oddly enough, I don't believe Dion clearly stated exactly what he believes the "core problems hindering adoption" are, either. But either way, if I simply wrote about the same old thing that everyone else writes about, then I wouldn't be adding much value, would I? Instead, I tried to describe the issues from a different, and yet still very valid, viewpoint.
My point about using wikis and blogs, which I can't decide whether Dion has an issue with or not, is that it's a good way of conveying the right messages and information from the bottom up. Most enterprise SOA initiatives fail miserably when the CIO stands up and says, "OK minions, though shalt adopt SOA and deploy it throughout the land. Now go make it happen!" To make SOA successful, you need to gain the buy-in of the folks on the ground who do the real work to keep the business running on a daily basis. For example, this article talks quite a bit about how getting developers on board was critical to Verizon's success with SOA.
Dion also talks about Web 2.0, and I believe what he's getting at is that he feels Web 2.0 approaches are better, faster, and easier than SOA. This is essentially the old WSDL vs. REST argument, and personally I think each approach has its place. There's no way that one of these will completely replace the other. What matters to a very significant degree, though, is what your developers are comfortable with. Forcing them to use approaches that they're not familiar with, regardless of how technically superior someone might consider them to be, is a recipe for disaster.
Dion also says:
For one thing, most SOAs actually have relatively little competition inside a given organization. Sure, some services could be obtained from other departments or from an outside supplier, but in reality there's little other choice most of the time. Yet, despite having no place to go, many SOA and EAI projects still fail to get engagement from their internal customers, despite the socialization and communication that Vinoski claims is key to adoption. They just don't want it or they can't use it.
First, I'm not sure I agree that SOAs have no internal competition. Their competition is the status quo. In general, people don't like change. Also, I guess I don't understand the latter part of the above quote. If people aren't engaging with SOA because "they just don't want it or they can't use it," then they clearly have not been convinced of the benefits. The answer to that is indeed better communication, especially from other teams who have adopted SOA and have succeeded with it.
And finally, Dion states:
What I don't want to convey is that socializing SOA is undesirable or unimportant, far from it. But it's not the first order of business or the most important aspect of adoption.
Nowhere does my column claim that socializing SOA and communicating about it is the most important aspect of SOA adoption. Rather, I present it as something that folks at certain levels of a company can do to help get their services adopted and used by other teams. And judging from the first part of the above quote, it seems that Dion agrees with that. The fact is, getting any new approaches or changes adopted within an enterprise requires socializing the ideas and communicating about them -- I really don't see how anyone could argue with that.