Here's the number one SOA post in 2007

IT hearts SOA, right?

The most popular post in terms of traffic for this SOA blogsite in 2007 was one that provided a contrarian view to the most closely held belief around SOA: the view that IT is out there alone, killing itself trying to convince the rest of the business of the wonders of SOA.

However, as discussed in the post Analyst: IT departments are sabotaging SOA, it is alleged that IT itself may not necessarily be the biggest booster of SOA.

ZapThink's Ron Schmelzer laid the blame for SOA inertia right at the doorstep of the folks that are supposed to be its prime advocates — IT departments. Ron says business executives, for the most part, seem to get SOA. They realize the benefits of an agile, reusable, and loosely coupled architecture:

"Even when a business has approved the investment of significant sums in their SOA projects, ZapThink has found that in many cases, their own IT organization can and will sabotage those efforts, slowing the SOA drive to a crawl."

Sounds like fighting words to me. And sure enough, Ron's thoughts stirred up plenty of discussion. Ron said that IT may be lukewarm to SOA for a myriad of reasons, most of all the fact that it requires a cultural change it IT departments, from tightly coupled to loosely coupled integration approaches.

One reader commented, "Stupidity is sabotaging SOA," observing that nobody -- from exceutives on down -- seems to get it right on a broad scale, though it can be made to work on a project-by-project basis. He recounts how he saw a working project built by three programmers turned it into a SOA project with 33 people. "Six months later they're still using the same basic core application built by the original three developers who have since moved on to new projects."

Another commented: "Perhaps IT departments can see through the SOA cloud of FUD and vapor to recognize it for what it really is; just another marketing buzzword dreamed up by sales weasles.... SOA is nothing. SOA does nothing. Everything it claims was done better, and long before, by Object Oriented methods. SOA offers nothing different than what the vast majority of good IT teams have been doing for more than a decade..."

And still another reader said IT was actually "the front line against idiocy." IT makes sure corporate information is kept safe, and SOA has yet to prove itself to many IT professionals who may have to stake their careers on promoting it. "If IT was convinced that this model was sustainable without risk to the information, they would not only remove blocks from it's progress, they would drive it themselves."

The top 10 SOA posts for this blogsite for the year 2007 can be found here (numbers 2-4), here (5-7), and here (8-10).