SOA - Loosing sight of agility

Its getting harder and harder to remember that the idea behind the SOA technology is agility - agility in the sense that the business can get the business processes it wants when it wants them. That timescale is increasingly measured in hours or days, not months or years.

The aspect of systems that is driven by change is the knowledge encapsulated within them. When you create a service to, say, configure a service or product within an order entry system, the service or product is changing to meet market demand. Insurance policy constraints change regularly due to legislation as well as market forces - in short, agility can only be achieved if it is possible to adapt and maintain elemental or replace composite services easily - within hours.

Its the technology used to create the services that will ultimately determine the level of agility achieved, and therefore the ROI gained. Coding services the old fashioned way - functional specification, program spec, programming in a language etc - is, therefore, not a realistic option. At the end of many man years effort, all a company will have is another legacy system, albeit made up of composite services carefully orchestrated.

Look for a technology that enables users to create composite services without any coding - that's where agility lies.