BEA Arch2Arch Summit: Companies must bridge SOA divide

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To be truly successful with their service oriented architecture (SOA) efforts, businesses must find a way of stimulating collaborative thinking to bring together the necessary people from disparate parts of the organisation.

So says Roman Stanek, HP's SOA director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), who addressed an audience of architects at BEA Systems' Arch2Arch Summit in Nice this week by telling them that one of the main SOA hurdles they must clear is to find a way of getting people who aren't used to or don't want to work side by side to do so.

"I've been working on SOA [for a number of years] and I believe we're still scratching the surface of what's needed," he said, adding that there are three main parties involved in SOA, the people that build the strategy, the service providers and then the people that consume that service.

"People often ask why SOA takes so long. It's because the people supposed to build it are not used to collaborating. How do they know that they can actually work together? We have examples of companies where customer service sits in Phoenix and the service consumption group sits somewhere else so we need to create a bridge. SOA is a distributed effort where we need to navigate people to a common goal."

The virtual gulf between the necessary SOA stakeholders can be bridged by focusing on people, information and processes, said Stanek, who advised organisations to ensure that those tasked with working together but separately enjoy a two-way free exchange of ideas and data so that everyone involved is clear about the bigger picture and how their individual components link in to the others.

"The service may work in isolation but it may not work in a composite environment so things need to be tested from an end user perspective to ensure they are performing to the required level of operation. This information should go to the developers, those in charge of quality, finance and so on," Stanek said.

"One of the characteristics of SOA is the fact that the rate of change is quite high. The rate of change is going up and the complexity is increasing exponentially so having a good testing environment and performance measurement is key for success with SOA."

Building on an earlier summit theme of governance, Stanek echoed previous speakers' words by urging companies to move the issue up their agendas as it's critical in making SOA work.

"I believe the consumers are the most difficult group as they are not used to receiving services from someone else. How do you fund it and trust somebody else? A good example would be eBay. How is it that I can by stuff on eBay from somebody I have never met? It's because eBay acts as a trusted intermediary and tells me that this is someone I can trust or someone I cannot," he said.

"That's the same role that governance plays in SOA by saying 'This is a five star service and you can trust it or this is a one star service so no-one should probably use it.' We have to prove that services can be trusted and that there is no surprise waiting for us [as consumers of that service."

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