Thursday, October 07, 2004

Confessions of an IT Cook: Ingredients for a Service Oriented Architecture

So we have all heard this over and over. Here's the magic receipe for SOA, as per the industry :

Ingredients:
  • Multiple business applications, preferably residing in multiple databases
  • Lots of platforms
  • Lack of integrations, needing lots of manual scrubbing and redundant data entry
  • lack of standardized processes
  • Lack of common definition of fundamental constructs like Customer, Product, Item
Steps to a perfect solution:
  • First, identify all discrete business steps within every application
  • Create web services !
  • Now mix all the web services in all the apps together and shake well
  • Make sure that you pour this into a container that can hold all of them - call it the "orchestrator", "glue", "process integrator" or whatever
  • Now slap on various user interfaces on top of this and call them "consumers"
  • Just for fun, sprinkle some "business process tools" on top of this and let your end business users run amok with the combinations, just like a kid in a candy store who wants a mixture of jelly beans !
  • After this, all you need is to examine how great your culinary skills are - just use a "business activity monitor" and if the tempearture drops or rises above thresholds - just set off an "exception workflow" and you are all set!
So - what am I missing ?

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