EA Dead? Long Live SOA!
I just finished reading through Thomas Erl’s latest book SOA: Principles of Service Design. It is a great read for those getting involved in Service Oriented Architecture, yet one thing he doesn’t adress head-on is where does Enterprise Architecture end and SOA begin? All he says is that “SOA spans BOTH enterprise and application architecures.” – not much help.
With apologies to every organization that’s invested boatloads of money in developing an EA, I’m starting to believe EA in general is dead. Why do I think it’s dead? In my eight years of doing EA, I have yet to see an EA effort that meets my five criteria for success:
- EA championed by senior executive from start to finish
- EA addresses all levels–business needs, systems capabilities, technical standards
- EA development followed through to produce at least one full iteration of products
- EA products integrated in to systems acquisition and operational planning processes
- EA success evaluated based on achievement of real business results
Because of this, organization’s are growing weary of their EA efforts – I have seen many EA efforts come to a screeching halt recently. And, with EA on life-support, in comes SOA–tada!
Tell me what you think…r/Chuck