SOA from an Enterprise 2.0 perspective
Yesterday at the SOA Symposium in Amsterdam, I had the opportunity to share something I have been working on for the past 1.5 years, a communication model called SPOT. SPOT stands for single point of truth and refers to sharing all relevant information on products in the case of Philips.
The title of my presentation was ‘Freeing the flow of information!’, something we from content management have been trying to achieve ever since it was first formulated like this in Ann Rockley’s book ‘Managing Enterprise Content’. Anyhow, in my opinion this is what SOA is all about as well. The idea of enabling information to get to the place where it can be used.
The point of my presentation was that you need to know what you are sharing. You need to know which objects you are talking about, what information is needed, when and by whom. If you simply see SOA as technically enabling all systems to get information from each other, you end up spreading garbage throughout your entire landscape. You need to have one authoritative source on each piece of information that deserves or needs sharing.
One true source per information item was a commonly accepted lemma during the sessions yesterday. But for me that was still not enough. I believe that without centrally managing your objects (a.k.a. master data management) you will still end up with an unmanageable situation where each system or person needs to know quite a lot about the landscape it is part of.
Practicing good Enterprise 2.0 I know that ‘emergence’ requires that the agents in the system, in this case the IT systems in the landscape, are as dumb as possible. Emergence thrives when agents are unaware of the system they are part of. More on this you can find in this, unfortunately Dutch, article.
So basically, I do not like it that IT systems need to have a lot of detailed knowledge of where to get what information. You need a referral system that gives you a pointer to the correct source.
When I put this statement to the audience something remarkable happened. Half of them stated that this was exactly what SOA was about, the other half said that this single system in the middle was just one service and therefore not architectural SOA.
Now, I am not a SOA expert. I am an information gal. And the only thing I know is that things go terribly wrong if you implement SOA in a landscape where your information is not designed for sharing. Internal IT data models are not and should not be designed for sharing. You need a different communication model, like SPOT, to do so. So together, SOA, MDM and SPOT are the winning trio. That’s where I place my bet.
