SOA Manifesto

by KodefuGuru 4. December 2009 17:08

In late October of 2009, seventeen luminaries of the service oriented architecture community came together to debate and hash out a document known as the SOA Manifesto. This paper establishes what was missing amongst the hype: clarity and direction.

SOA prioritizes:

Business value over technical strategy
Strategic goals over project-specific benefits
Intrinsic interoperability over custom integration
Shared services over specific-purpose implementations
Flexibility over optimization
Evolutionary refinement over pursuit of initial perfection

And here are the guiding principles of SOA:

Respect the social and power structure of the organization.

Recognize that SOA ultimately demands change on many levels.

The scope of SOA adoption can vary. Keep efforts manageable and within meaningful boundaries.

Products and standards alone will neither give you SOA nor apply the service orientation paradigm for you.

SOA can be realized through a variety of technologies and standards.

Establish a uniform set of enterprise standards and policies based on industry, de facto, and community standards.

Pursue uniformity on the outside while allowing diversity on the inside.

Identify services through collaboration with business and technology stakeholders.

Maximize service usage by considering the current and future scope of utilization.

Verify that services satisfy business requirements and goals.

Evolve services and their organization in response to real use.

Separate the different aspects of a system that change at different rates.

Reduce implicit dependencies and publish all external dependencies to increase robustness and reduce the impact of change.

At every level of abstraction, organize each service around a cohesive and manageable unit of functionality.

I agree with all of these, but I do have confusion about the first principle: “respect the social and power structure of the organization.” That’s good advice for someone navigating a political structure in business, but what exactly does that have to do with a service oriented architecture? It seems like an auxiliary concern that shouldn’t be included in the guiding principles of the manifesto, yet seventeen people smarter than me decided to stick it at the top. What am I missing?

In any case, I do agree with the manifest, and I’ve signed it. Have you?

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Tags: soa, manifesto

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Comments

12/4/2009 5:09:29 PM #

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SOA Manifesto

DotNetKicks.com

12/4/2009 6:33:03 PM #

I didn't see the correlation between the social and power structure of an organization and its SOA until I considered the Shared Services aspect of it. When you consider ownership and maintenance of shared services, I think the social and power structure of the organization becomes vital.

If you're lucky, you work for an organization that is efficient enough to not have (m)any barriers to getting work done that are due to social or political reasons.

Curtis Mitchell

12/5/2009 12:00:17 PM #

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Daily tech links for .net and related technologies - December 5-6, 2009

Sanjeev Agarwal

12/5/2009 3:10:40 PM #

I've actually found the SOA Manifesto to be a bit baffling, not because I disagree with any of its tenets per se, but I fail to see how/why it is SOA specific. It's more of a "get IT aligned with the business in a pragmatic, useful way" document. Personally, I think it is actually harmed by being associated with SOA, because SOA is quickly becoming synonymous with "monolithic technical boondoggle", for better or for worse. Too many things got called "SOA" when they weren't, too many people sold "SOA" that couldn't be sold, and too many people tryied to force things into the SOA model when it didn't make sense.

J.Ja

Justin James

12/11/2009 8:12:39 AM #

Let me address the concerns expressed.

1. “Respect the social and power structure of the organization.”

At an enterprise level SERVICE ORIENTATION and a SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE provide a more open mechanism for accessing capabilities through their SERVICE CONTRACTS. It makes it easier to reuse existing SERVICES and create new ones in line with business needs. What is very important in looking at this from an enterprise perspective is who owns the SERVICE, who has the budget and how do we cost account for the use of a SERVICE. Respecting the social and power structures of an organization is critical in understanding the economic effect of a SERVICE, how it is used and how it can continue to be used over time. Aligning budgets for SERVICES and aligning the use of SERVICES to some cost accounting mechanism requires that budgets are aligned to the power structures and that the SERVICE is cost accounted for, based on the social and economic power structures within an organization. Getting this wrong can result in SERVICE degradation over time as more people use it and budgets for its subsequent maintenance and operational use fail to reflect it use and importance.

2. SOA specific
In many ways the Manifesto is not applicable to just SOA. But that is important as it turns out failure often arises in SOA because of a lack of understanding of how SOA and Enterprise Architecture need to work hand in hand to deliver business value. So many of the principles and value statements are just as applicable to good Enterprise Architecture. What SOA and SO do is make it easier to align IT to business and so make it easier for Enterprise Architects to deliver business value through IT.

Hope this helps.

Steve Ross-Talbot