The promise of SOA - what has it brought so far?

SOA has been around for a few years now, time to see what it has brought us. Especially since SOA 2.0 seems to be an excuse to us all to forget the imperfections of SOA and hurry over to the next hype, leaving SOA behind in its own rubble

I think SOA is a good concept. IT is bad enough for the business as it is, with all its inherent diversity: one business, a few processes, and dozens or hundreds of applications supporting it. And, since CRM and ERP, we all know very well that the one-size-fits-all promise is yet another Utopia, slowing down your business rather than doing the opposite

Doing SOA the right way

Here are my 4 points:

1. Understand the diversity, and the evolutionary law: everything will always change. You might think that you achieved a lot by homogenising today's mess, but just wait 5 years and then have another look. Thou must always translate - and leaveth that to professionals. There is no one-size-fits-all

2. Diversity as in applications, but also as in languages spoken. In Europe, 2,000 years ago Greek and Latin were cool, then vulgar Latin took over, French was okay since 1600, English rules since 1900.

Architecture as a pressure cooker

Right about now I'm reading about a company that wants an enterprise-wide Service Bus "to glue it all together" (my own words) and create an agile, flexible service oriented architecture (their words)

Now, how well have they thought about the different departments, each dealing with different business pieces, consumer sub-markets, various government regulations, different timings (8/5, 12/6, 24/7) etc?

Not at all. It's all tech-talk. Here's the worst part: The ESB must support SOAP over JMS outside, and SOAP over HTTP inside. Described in WSDL. Now I know exactly what that implies, but the authors probably don't have a clue themselves.