What? SOA is dead?

For example, Anne Thomas Mane’s ‘obituary ‘on Jan 5: SOA is Dead; Long Live Services gave us a head start on the new year by declaring the death of SOA:

Once thought to be the savior of IT, SOA instead turned into a great failed experiment… SOA was supposed to reduce costs and increase agility on a massive scale… SOA has failed to deliver its promised benefits. After investing millions, IT systems are no better than before. In many organizations, things are worse: costs are higher, projects take longer, and systems are more fragile than ever. The people holding the purse strings have had enough. With the tight budgets of 2009, most organizations have cut funding for their SOA initiatives.

It’s time to accept reality. SOA fatigue has turned into SOA disillusionment. Business people no longer believe that SOA will deliver spectacular benefits.

What a new year’s blast! And what a firework of reactions in the blogosphere:

Fireworks on the Death of SOA

• SOA is Dead?
• SOA is Dead? It’s About Time!
• SOA is dead! Was it ever alive?
• SOA is dead; long live Model-Driven SOA
• The King (SOA) Is Dead; Long Live the King
• Technical SOA is Dead
• Goodbye SOA, we hardly knew you.
• SOA – Wanted! Dead or Alive
• SOA: Wanted Dead or Alive
• Even if SOA Is Dead, SCA and SDO Alive and Well
• Why SOA Should Be Dead to the Business, but Alive and Well in IT
• Reports of SOA’s Death: Greatly Exaggerated or Dead-On?
• The People Who Think SOA is Dead, Are Dead

There’s an excellent overview at InfoQ as well. I don’t think we have seen this reaction from the IT crowd since Nicholas Carr claimed that IT doesn’t matter in  in 2003.

Take the longer view

But maybe we should take a longer term view. What seems like ‘death’ when you look too close is only a natural part of the way that innovative, complex new technology is always adopted. Although SOA technology standards are maturing well, the vision of using SOA for increased reuse, flexibility and cost reduction is still new to businesses. After a phase of enthusiasm by early adopters it’s only natural to hit a period of disillusionment, waiting for the mainstream to follow.

SOA is not dead - it has just hit a natural 'chasm' of adoption

We have known this since Geoffrey Moore’s all-time classic Crossing the Chasm: Going from the enthusiastic few to mainstream adoption is the hard part. The majority won’t adopt SOA for business flexibility until it has matured and become more easy and less risky to adopt.

So just because service-oriented architecture is in a chasm right now, it doesn’t mean it’s dead. It just needs to get ready for prime-time.

‘Architecture’ key to maturity

And as Anne Thomas Mane notes in a follow-up podcast, a key to maturity lies in doing architecture:

One of my favorite comments that came back from the blog post were the number of people who said, “Basically, we just really suck at doing architecture.”

Couldn’t agree more. Architecture is the fundamental structure that doesn’t change every other day. Architecture is the long term view.

The time for the ‘A’ in SOA has finally come.

WHAT better occasion to start a new blog on business and technology than the first full-blown public enterprise architecture framework? As a TOGAF veteran and one of the first to certify back in 2004 I’ve been deeply involved with TOGAF for many years and particularly interested to see how the long-awaited TOGAF 9 would turn out.

TOGAF architecture development cycle

TOGAF 9 is a major step forward for enterprise architecture. For the first time, TOGAF 9 puts out a complete enterprise architecture framework to the public, covering the full spectrum of the content to describe it, the process to do it and capability needed to enable it.

For many years, companies have turned to frameworks like Zachman and others for guidance on achieving control and flexibility of their business and technology landscapes, only to find that these frameworks are incomplete and each with a specific focus. Companies has been left to ‘mix and match to suit their needs’ (Randy Heffner, Forrester), ‘just choose one and use it’ (Bruce Robertson, Gartner), or in reality often buying consultants or simply stop using enterprise architecture as strategy.

Not any more. Now, TOGAF 9 offers a one-stop shop that makes significantly easier for enterprises to adopt and realise the benefits of enterprise architecture.

A new, best-in-class content framework

The single biggest news about TOGAF is a new, mature, well-defined architecture content framework of 170 pages, built on the experience of major systems integrators through hundreds of architecture projects.

The new Architecture Content Framework (ACF)

TOGAF is traditionally best known for the Architecture Development Method (ADM) shown as a ‘crop circle’ diagram, and often used along with other frameworks like Zachman for describing the content. Now, with the new TOGAF framework companies have the opportunity to say “Never mind” Zachman and those other frameworks, and just stick with TOGAF for the entire work on enterprise architecture.

This TOGAF Architecture Content Framework (ACF) is a major step forward for enterprise architecture, bringing companies closer to achieve the increased control and flexibility of business and technology landscapes that EA is meant to create.

Guidance on applying TOGAF

Another downside with all those architecture frameworks are in many cases the lack of guidance on how to actually use them. It is great that you can classify all the outputs into some 6×6 matrix, but how do you actually apply that to solve strategic business issues?

With TOGAF 9, many of the bits and pieces of advice previously scattered around the documentation has been put together in a separated part of the documentation and then expanded with guidance on handling the TOGAF architecture development method (ADM) flexibly for different situations:

• Apply iteration and working on specific parts of the architecture development process with different stakeholders, possibly at the same time
• Apply the ADM at different enterprise levels for different types of architecture engagements from strategy to implementation and at different times along the roadmap towards the to-be architecture
• Integrate security and specific methods, views throughout the phases of the architecture development method
• Define and govern SOAs using the concepts of TOGAF.

While no guidance can ever stand alone and the only way to build an architecture capability is to deeply understand, apply and practice the underlying concepts of this discipline, the guidance in TOGAF 9 is certainly enough to get architects started off in the right direction of using TOGAF to address important business issues using enterprise architecture.

A ‘modular’ structure

Finally, TOGAF 9 rearranges the different parts of the TOGAF documentation into a more ‘modular’ structure, and adds further detail to some of these seven parts:

• The content framework and as well as the guidelines on using the ADM are each put in their own, new sections
• Many of the various TOGAF ‘resources’ around governance, skills etc. are put together in a separate section and developed further into a ‘capability framework’.

Structure of the TOGAF document

These are the major changes to the document, put to market by The Open Group as a ‘modular’ structure where each part can be developed independently. While this is maybe a bit over the top, a clear document structure certainly an enabler for production and could result in more frequent publishing than we have seen with TOGAF since version 8 in 2002 and 8.1 in 2003.

Conclusion

Never mind the architecture frameworks – stick to TOGAF 9 for content as well as process.

Of course, in a full enterprise-class framework some areas are bound not to be fully defined in the first release. Notably, the concepts of the new content framework are not fully worked out through the other parts of the documentation yet; and developing the various parts of TOGAF independently might prevent the full integration between them, potentially undermining the strength of a full framework.

But the key message remains clear: TOGAF 9 presents the first public enterprise architecture framework to cover the full spectrum of content, process and capabilities needed, as well as guidance on how to use it to address specific scenarios such as SOA, security.