I read a blog post today by Anne Thomas Manes entitled SOA is about Architecture that I would recommend to anyone interested in Web Services and SOA. As BYU embarks on creating web services, we seem to be taking an incremental approach of developing services as they are needed on a project by project basis. Anne discourages this approach.
“[Some people recommend] an incremental approach to SOA: Just build services as you need them on a project-by-project basis, and at some point in the future you can go back and consolidate the services you’ve built and somehow derive some architectural consistency. Unfortunately, this strategy invariably leads to Just a Bunch of Web Services (JABOWS) because the future consolidation step almost never happens. The result is too many services, too many moving parts, and too many brittle connections. Systems wind up being more expensive and more fragile than ever before.”
Fortunately Anne also provides a formula for success.
“The highly-touted benefits of SOA derive from architectural improvement, not from any particular technology. But architecture is hard. And it requires a fair amount of organizational maturity to accomplish. Organizational maturity is a function of five organizational dynamics:
- Governance: Establishing policies, guidelines, and decision-making authority
- Management: Enforcing policies and directing day-to-day opearations
- Leadership: Inspiring people to perform
- Skills: Ensuring people know how to do what they need to do
- Practices: Establishing structure that helps people do what they need to do
“Attempting to do SOA without also attempting to strengthen these five organizational pillars will invariably result in failure.”
Thanks to the foundational work that has been done over several years at BYU, I believe the university is well positioned in the five pillars that Anne points out above. What we do need is a stronger commitment to data modeling and data stewardship which I believe is essential to success. We also need to develop a roadmap of webservices. The Enterprise Governance Advisory Board (EGAB) has ownership for the roadmap, but the creation of a Center of Excellence with a product manager and an architect chartered to spend time on the roadmap is needed to avoid creating JABOWS here at BYU.
Tags: Architecture, SOA, Web Services