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The sometimes stormy politics of service-enabling

SOA is messy for now -- but that's okay
Written by Joe McKendrick, Contributing Writer

I've been meaning to link to Dana Gardner's latest piece on SOA cultural issues for some time now, so here it is. SOA is messy for now -- but that's okayAs his title so aptly puts it: "We know that SOA depends on culture shifts, but -- like the weather -- we still don't do much about it."

Dana observes that SOA has failed as an energizing force because it's effects are unclear or unexplained:

"SOA’s great promise is to help align people, process, and processing. But something remains in the way. SOA lacks a political context. It lacks power over the people, and so far the power of the people has not been much interested in embracing SOA and its effects. Why should they? We haven’t told them what the real-life effects of SOA are."

Because it touches so many processes and parts of the business, SOA is inherently a complex undertaking. Dana points out that organizational politics gets in the way every time, however.

Another point I want to add is that SOA has been mainly an IT-driven activity. To a large extent, we're looking to IT managers to sell transformation to the business, and often, it's something beyond the scope of many IT managers' responsibilities or organizational capabilities. And, actually, IT managers shouldn't be selling "SOA" to their businesses, they should be selling improved or streamlined processes.

Add to that the constant vendor chatter of how their customers will somehow automatically be "upgraded"to SOA within new releases, as if that in and of itself will somehow override the fuss and muss of organizational politics. Again, vendors seem to be leaning on IT managers to go out and work miracles across their enterprises.

SOA will and is being accomplished in fits and starts, here and there, in islands that eventually will form into interconnected archipelagos. But for now, it's messy -- but that's okay.

As Dana reminds us, "the politics of change in large, complex organizations remains a mystical, quizzical patchwork of leaps, lunges and stumbles... Let’s not necessarily blame SOA or IT, any more than we should blame the rain...."

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