August 3rd, 2007
'Let market forces drive SOA' discussion, continued
There has been an interesting chat going on across the blogosphere as to whether the best approach to SOA development is top-down and bottom-up, or whether to start small or start in a big way.
Ian Thomas recently weighed in on the discussion, agreeing with Nick Malik that neither top-down nor bottom-up are sufficient on their own — there needs to be an enterprise perspective, but at the same time end-users need to be empowered:
“I believe that the best approach is a combination of governance and anarchy - govern the commitments assigned to the atomic parts of the business but delegate all further implementation concerns to the owners of these atomic units (and this obviously cascades downwards given the fractal nature of services).”
Ian admits that this obviously will result in duplication of services, but this is okay. Some services will be in demand, and will get widely shared. Essentially, Ian notes that market demand (both internally and externally) should drive service creation and deployment. Vacuums can be filled by either internal joint ventures or enterprising third parties.
He calls some corporate efforts to force business units into the use of shared services a “naive approach to service-orientation.” The result of such an approach is that “services become an onerous tax imposed by IT rather than a real enabler for change and value creation.”
Just the other week, I posted thoughts on letting market forces drive service creation and adoption. Through chargebacks and other mechanisms, business units should be able to subscribe to both internal and external SOA services, just as they would subscribe to Software as a Service. (SaaS is a concept business users grasp much more easily than SOA.)
Ian agrees that market forces should rule: “the best way to manage service orientation in a sustainable way is to concentrate on metricization and monetization and leave the rest to the ‘market’ (whether internal or external)… Let self interest flourish within the bounds set by the organizational context as long as it delivers cost-effective services but punish it by outsourcing where it doesn’t.”
Joe McKendrick is an author and consultant with deep knowledge and insights regarding trends and developments in the technology industry. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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