The second day at the Business Integration Forum in Wiesbaden came up with some interesting discussions and presentations. I was also able to join a presentation by Google at the Web 2.0 Congress which took place at the same conference center.
In many discussions during the conference the problems in implementing an SOA where pointed out. It seems that most of the SOA stakeholders are struggling with the same issues. Here just some of it:
- Missing SOA standards for business content
- Lack of best practices
- No SOA governance
- Capabilities of IT systems are not specified
- Lack of service reuse
- IT driven guerrilla SOA approaches
Together with these issues 4 major questions came up:
- How can I identify existing services?
- How do I meet the right granularity of services?
- How can I ensure service reuse?
- How can I keep my service landscape transparent?
Of course each software vendor has different answers to these questions. But I believe that technology alone cannot solve the issues. It’s important that business and IT people are combined in SOA teams to define the business requirements of the technical processes. One person is essential for the success of this team. I call this person Process Engineer. He understands the business content and is able to translate it into technical content. He is the mediator between the worlds. Unfortunately, there are not too many Process Engineers out there. I hope that we will get more “hybrid specialists” with the increased reach of SOA.
More Information to Business Integration Forum 2008 in German:
www.business-integration-forum.de
At the same conference center in Wiesbaden the Web 2.0 Congress took place. I joined the ‘Online Selfunding Model’ presentation from Google. Mr. Patrick Warnking - in case you read this post – I really enjoyed your speech. Here just one finding which really amazed me: Each minute 10 hours of video material are uploaded on YouTube. Think about this….. More Information to the Web 2.0 Congress in German: