I think what we are seeing is that SOA as a term and services themselves as a discussion point are still very much an IT language, said Graham in a Computer Business Review interview. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Some analysts and other market watchers have argued that SOA helps to frame a common language between IT and the business. But Graham – a former CIO of billion-dollar companies and founding partner of IT strategy and management firm Feld Group – said that business users are still more comfortable talking in terms of business processes rather than services.
The language of services as far as the business is concerned is still business processes, said Graham. Those business processes may still be resolved by services at the back end, but business users want to talk about processes.
However he said that the gap between IT and the business in terms of SOA terminology, understanding and orchestration is gradually closing. The holy grail is when business processes resolve to real transactions on the back-end, he said. When IT operations can put in services designed for business processes by less technical business analysts and services specialists – that is what we are getting towards.
Graham pointed to BEA’s acquisition of business process management software vendor Fuego in March 2006, and its integration with the acquired Plumtree portal technology for front-end user interface and composite application development, as an example of what can be done when business process management meets services-based development.
We now have one layer for the business analysts around composite applications, and then connection into back-end transactions, said Graham. Less technical analysts can do real programming but using composite-type technology.
Graham said that much has already been done by BEA in terms of resolving the inter-play between processes as perceived by the business and services as defined by IT. It’s not going to happen overnight, but I can say that that gap is closing and it is a worthy thing to go and do, he said.
In parallel, Graham said that he sees more and more companies looking at SOA as an enterprise-wide, rather than project-by-project initiative. As you see more and more enterprise-wide SOA strategies, they heighten the need for governance, said Graham. Companies are trying to scale [SOA] in order to get ahead of their challenges.
