Fighting SOA complexity with lots of committees
As you may have heard, the OASIS group has responded to demands to simplify SOA by announcing the formation of six new committees intended to advance the Service Component Architecture family of specifications.
It's tempting to launch in with with some lame committee jokes, such as "a camel is a horse designed by an SOA committee," then add that "you can lead a camel to an oasis, but you can't make him drink," or something like that... (Sorry, couldn't resist...)
OASIS definitely took its share of razzing for this move, and I think Dick Weisinger aptly summed up reactions up in his latest post:
"To fight the criticism of SOA complexity, the IT industry standards body OASIS has responded in a strange way: they’ve created six new technical committees (TCs) to go off and hammer out more specifications. The world of SOA is already floating in a sea of complex specifications. There are even Web sites dedicated to trying to map the relationships between the many specs. OASIS defends their approach by noting that splitting up into the smaller highly-specialized committees will enable quick progress on the individual topics because they are being addressed by small groups comprised of topic experts."
Sounds like OASIS opted for the Start-Small versus the Big Bang approach to standards creation.