Smart SOA

As you will see elsewhere on the Alphacourt website, we are running a joint seminar series with IBM titled 'IMPACT Comes To You' (see here).  The main theme of these seminars is 'Smart SOA'.

Giving the normal noise and meaningless labels that tend to adorn (re-)launches of products and offerings, I have to say that Smart SOA is certainly not one of the dumbest brand ideas, and even has some special merit, although perhaps not in the way that Big Blue's marketing folk may have envisaged.

First of all though, I need to get one thing off my chest.  Applying the tag Smart to software is an oxymoron.  Most people's experience of software is the other dictionary meaning of smart: "to be the cause of a sharp, stinging pain, as an irritating application".  Remember expert systems with their fuzzy logic? Or Intelligent software that can think for you - HAL 9000 from 2001?  Software only does what you it tell it to do, and then you have to be precise in how you say it.

Smart SOA works as a phrase when you consider it more as an application of the old acronym SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timely) to Service Oriented Architecture.   Given the ongoing challenge of IT to deliver genuine and lasting business benefits, it makes sense to at least appear to be trying to add value.

Most people's experience of SOA so far has been either patchy (we wrote a web service and it worked - we'll try another one next year) or frightened (analysts quoting cost of building SOA to be larger than most companies' annual budget).  Even though many CIOs see moving to SOA inevitable, most are still challenged to articulate what the business is going to get for its money if they allow their IT people another toy to play with (IT is usually seen as Kevin the teenager - inarticulate, negative, late for everything and getting bored with anything new they buy).

Taking a SMART approach, IT can provide their parents, I mean sponsors, with clear goals and benefits for any investment project, along with a set of metrics to ensure that promises are quantified and understood.

Another way to get SMART is to break down the journey, by phasing in the adoption of new architecture, rather than going for a big bang implementation.  I have found that this evolutionary approach is both more acceptable to business as well as being more practical, less risky and therefore more cost-effective.

It is unlikely that many CIOs are going to be given a blank cheque in the current economic climate - we are back to the 'do more with less' attitudes of the early Noughties.  So Smart SOA is not about clever software, but about being SMARTer in how we make use of it.

John 'Mensa (Retired)' Moe