Five changes now shaping SOA as we know it

Okay, enough wrangling over whether SOA is dead, or is thriving, or never even existed, or crashed somewhere near Roswell, New Mexico. The indisputable fact is many organizations are now working toward service orientation for at least part of their business application offerings, and this will only grow.

So we move to the next set of challenges and changes SOA will bring. Baseline's Bob Violino has assembled this great overview of what to expect with SOA at this time, and in the next few years to come:

1) Increased visibility as SOA moves from theory to practice: SOA is becoming well-known, but SOA success tends to be a well-kept secret. Most organizations now have one or two SOA-related projects somewhere on the premises, and now it's a matter of spreading the word. "After SOA has been successfully deployed in one or two projects, information-technology managers must articulate the value of a service-based architecture to business executives and employees," Violino writes.

2) New types of jobs: There may even be new classes of jobs arising within organizations using SOA, Violino writes: "Service creators," often developers and architects; "service consumers," most likely to be business process experts; and "service librarians" who will oversee repositories and governance.

3) The rise of best practices and competency centers: Everyone needs to learn and absorb service oriented methodologies.

4) More governance and reuse: Expect to see more emphasis on developing SOA governance committees to get a better handle on services being created and run.

5) More measurement: Companies are starting to get their arms around this. If you don't measure, you won't know if SOA is making a difference. The biggest challenge with SOA: justifying expenditures for something with a long-term payoff.