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A Service-Oriented Summer Reading List

A good place to start is to get a high-level perspective of what SOA means, if anything, to the business at large. Service Orient or Be Doomed! , by ZapThink's Ron Schmelzer and Jason Bloomberg, may fill the bill. Don't let the dramatic title fool you, however -- "doom" doesn't necessarily await all those who aren't service orienting. Instead, non-believers probably will be left to fester in their archaic, calcified and siloed processes.

In the book, the authors discuss what they call the "secret sauce" of SOA, which is loose coupling. They describe the concept as akin to making every interaction with and between IT systems as easy as surfing the Web. "What if any step in any business process could take advantage of loose coupling to the point that not only human-to-computer interactions had it this easy, forgiving nature, but computer-to-computer interactions did as well? That's the power behind service orientation."

Power indeed. The authors optimistically observe that with an SOA focus, IT can play a role in more strategic business endeavors. For example, a telecom company may offer consumers that ability to pick and choose their own bundles of services. Traditionally, IT has always been regarded as a cost center, serving a tactical role. Even when things did evolve to where IT made competitive new business models possible - such as Websites and e-commerce - the differentiation was quickly lost, because every company could build such capabilities.

Next, after Doomed! convinces you that your organization desperately needs SOA, you need to develop a roadmap to plot the course of your SOA. From Big Blue (IBM Press) comes Service-Oriented Architecture Compass , written by Norbert Bieberstein and several other colleagues. While the book is fairly a dry read (have liquid refreshment ready), it does cover all the ground of need-to-know stuff in selling, planning and implementing SOA. It’s a good reference for when you put together your next business plan or project proposal. The authors also discuss the seven guiding principles ever SOA should follow, including top-level commitment; close cooperation between business and IT; and by starting small in a “well-defined application or business process area.” The authors also encourage the adoption of “innovative software design engineering principles,” including open source development and event-based modeling. “Most existing IT architecture can be a choke point for business innovation, as monolithic systems and applications cannot be easily reused.” Rah.

In case you still think you won’t be able to make the case for SOA to your bosses, then another book that may be of interest (at least to readers in large US companies) is The Joy of SOX: Why Sarbanes-Oxley and Service-Oriented Architecture May Be the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You . While the title certainly may be somewhat of an oversell of the two converging worlds (okay, a huge oversell – there is little joy to be found in SOX), author Hugh Taylor does make a convincing case of why SOA really can make a big difference for relieving immediate business pain. In fact, you don’t have to have to be in a SOX-afflicted company to appreciate the agility, transparency, and single view of the business SOA can bring. Taylor talks about. Perhaps he should just take references to SOX out of the title, and it all makes perfect sense.

SOX, passed in reaction to major accounting scandals, dictates that US-based publicly traded companies be able to prove that their financial numbers are what they say they are. SOX requires a process of auditable and internal controls on business-critical data – an expensive and invasive project. So, as a result, the financial people are coming to the IT and asking, 'is this data accurate?’ If not, make it so, but we’re not going to give you any more money to help you.’ SOA may be the way to integrate data and systems in an organized and cost effective way.

As Taylor puts it: "Although SOA is far from the only workable solution to agile compliance, it warrants serious attention because of its potential to enable broad interoperation of systems without the same heavy investment of time and money that traditional application integration methodologies have required… SOA solves some of the cycle time challenges of matching the software change management process to the business agility requirements of a corporate entity… SOA can streamline the process of connecting systems required for maintenance of internal controls."

Finally, to round out our summer reading selection with plenty of food for thought, a good place to visit is The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil, and his follow-up work, The Singularity is Near. In Spiritual Machines, published in 1999, Kurzweil says that computers are rapidly gaining intelligence, are acquiring humanlike intelligence, and will eventually even collectively exceed human intelligence. Within a few decades, computers will be able to gather knowledge on their own. On the carbon-based life form side, new technologies will be increasing our health and mental capabilities, thanks to nanotechnologies and knowledge systems. But the machines will grow smarter and smarter, and win. By the 2020s, "it will become increasingly difficult to draw any clear distinction between the capabilities of human and machine intelligence."

Kurzweil also predicted that by 2019, a $1,000 computer (in 1999 dollars) would have the computing capacity of a human brain, and by 2029, that power will grow to approximately 1,000 human brains. By that time, "automated agents are now learning on their own, and significant knowledge is now being created by machines on their own." Several decades later, by the end of the 21st century, there will be more software-based "humans" than carbon-based humans.

In case you finished this summer reading list, and are hungry for more, there’s a new primer on SOA coming out in the fall. Robin Bloor and his Hurwitz Group colleagues Judith Hurwitz and Carol Baroudi, are writing SOA for Dummies which will be available this fall from John Wiley & Sons.