Tony Sceales

I'm not for one minute suggesting that SOA isn't a very good way of building enterprise systems, but I think it's important to recognise that SOA is not a magic bullet, and is only one part of the overall solution. As Anne Thomas Manes has outlined, SOA may integrate application silos but it does not in itself transform organisations, break down organizational barriers or streamline processes. Neither does it guarantee that the services created are useful. One of the quirks of the IT industry is our love affair with the three letter acronym (or TLA as I suppose I should call it). Somewhere in the world there are a whole bunch of very clever marketing people slaving over the next-generation of TLAs as we speak. They are busy bundling up the hopes and dreams of the entire IT industry into three seductive letters that look mightily persuasive on a PowerPoint slide. One... (more)