EbizQ asked last week for views on the improvements people believe are required to make SOA a greater success. I think that if we step back we can see some hope – in fact increasing necessity – for SOA and the cloud is going to be the major factor in this.
If we think about the history of SOA to date it was easy to talk about the need for better integration across the organisation, clearer views of what was going on or the abstract notion of agility. Making it concrete and urgent was more of an issue, however. Whilst we can discuss the ‘failure’ of SOA by pointing to a lack of any application of service principles at a business level (i.e. organisationally through some kind of EA) this is really only a symptom and not the underlying cause. In reality the cause of SOA failure to date has been business inertia – organisations were already set up to do what they did, they did it well enough in a push economy and the (understandable) incentives for wholesale consideration of the way the business worked were few.
The cloud changes all of this, however. The increasing availability of cloud computing platforms and services acts as a key accelerator to specialisation and pull business models since it allows new entrants to join the market quickly, cheaply and scalably and to be more specialised than ever before. As a result many organisational capabilities that were economically unviable as market offerings are now becoming increasingly viable because of the global nature of cloud services. All of these new service providers need to make their capabilities easy to consume, however, and as a result are making good use of what people are now calling ‘apis’ in a web 2.0 context but which are really just services; this is important as one of the direct consequences of specialisation is the need to be hooked into the maximum number of appropriate value web participants as easily as possible.
On the demand side, as more and more external options become available in the marketplace that offer the potential to replace those capabilities that enterprises have traditionally executed in house, so leaders will start to rethink the purpose of their organisations and leverage the capabilites of external service providers in place of their own.
As a result cloud and SOA are indivisable if we are to realise the potential of either; cloud enables a much broader and more specialised set of business service providers to enter a global market with cost and capability profiles far better than those which an enterprise can deliver internally. Equally importantly, however, they will be implicitly (but concretely) creating a ‘business SOA catalogue’ within the marketplace, removing the need for organisations to undertake a difficult internal slog to re-implement or re-configure outdated capabilities for reuse in service models. Organisations need to use this insight now to trigger the use of business architecture techniques to understand their future selves as service-based organisations – both by using external services as archtypes to help them understand the ways in which they need to change and offer their own specialised services but also to work with potential partners to co-develop and then disaggregate those services in which they don’t wish to specialise in future.
Having said all that to set the scene for my answer(!) I believe that SOA research needs to be focused on raising the concepts of IT mediated service provision to a business level – including concrete modelling of business capabilities and value webs – along with complex service levels, contracts, pricing and composition – new cloud development platforms, tooling and management approaches linked more explicitly to business outcomes – and which give specialised support to different kinds of work – and the emergence of new 3rd parties who will mediate, monitor and monetise such relationships on behalf of participants in order to provide the required trust.
All in all I guess there’s still plenty to do.
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