SOA or Just a Bunch Of Web Services (JABOWS)?

A Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) is more than just a bunch of web services (JABOWS), but which do you have?

• Do you have a place where services can be discovered, learned about and tried out?
• Are your services being reused, sometimes in unexpected ways?
• Are your service clients viewed as customers?
• Are you able to upgrade service implementations and interfaces without any disruption to your service clients?
• Do you know how your services are being used?  Do you have service-level agreements that are being monitored and enforced?
• Do you have a service charging model?
• Are your developers enjoying and being rewarded for reuse?
• Do you have processes for regulating the usage and change of services?
• Are you able to provide dynamic capacity management?
• Do you have service development, interface and contract standards?
• Are your services secure?
• Do you have automated service regression testing?
• Does your business understand the need to protect its service assets, and to curb its appetite for tactical change?
• Could your services be easily exposed to the Cloud?

I think the last question is probably the most incisive.  If the answer is no, then you are just doing a bunch of web services, no matter what lip service you pay to the other questions.

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Enterprise Architecture or Just A Bunch Of Developers?

In the early days Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) we were told that SOA was not Just a Bunch of Web Services (JBOWS).  In a similar vein I would like to suggest that in order to build an SOA you need more than Just a Bunch of Developers (JBODS); you need an Enterprise Architecture.  I'm assuming of course that you have a medium to large enterprise to work with.  Small companies will be able to get a way with a single, highly cohesive and agile SOA team, but this does not scale well.

So what do I mean by Enterprise Architecture?

"The Only Constant In Life Is Change." 

- Heraclitus

For a corporation to be successful it must adapt to changing business markets and technological landscapes.  Managing change is crucial to the corporation’s ability to maintain its long-term market agility.

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