A number of posts have come to my attention lately all dealing, one way or another, with the notion of “Service Oriented Architecture” or SOA. Here, for example, is one that talks about a “Nice, lightweight SOA implementation” (May 18/08 ) as an illustration of some of the benefits of this approach; which in turn refers to Richard Ackerman’s presentation on SOA at the 2006 Access Conference (Dec 20/06) — Ackerman’s further reflections:

The main focus for library technology seems to be around the catalogue and adding layers on top of it, not breaking it apart into services. There still seems to be limited concrete action in working on library SOA to integrate with the various frameworks that are out there.

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I basically continue to be concerned about a lot of diverging wheel-reinvention activities, rather than seeing a lot of unifying activities starting to deliver good models and services.

And then found this on Paul Walker’s blog, “SOA and reusable knowledge” (Feb 26/08), which, as the title hints, downplays the idea of re-usable code, in favour of the interesting idea of re-usable knowledge (of the business or organization), and speaks of:

… the knowledge to be gained from adopting an SOA approach, with the intention that this can help organisations plan and prioritise their development efforts. While ‘re-use’ is a stated potential benefit of the e-Framework, it refers more to the re-use of understanding, documentation & design.

The “e-Framework” he refers to above is the “e-framework for Education and Research“, initiated from Australia and the UK. Walker’s inspiration appears to be this Feb 25/08 article in Infoworld, which, after noting the usual confusion and disappointment so commonly associated with buzzwords (and “SOA” is one), concludes:

Early adopters have discovered a harder-to-measure but more practical benefit to SOA: increased agility, Finley said. “Agility” in this context means being able to deploy new projects faster based on having adopted SOA as the fundamental approach to IT, in turn letting the business reap benefits from its IT initiatives faster.

Finley noted that the projects don’t happen faster because of code reuse. Instead, it is the changed mind-set that SOA brings to development and management of technology as a whole that provides the real benefit, Finley said.

What’s particularly interesting about this, to me, is the notion that “SOA” might well define an approach that goes beyond technical developments altogether, but is extendable to organizational structure and culture as well — perhaps involving, for example, breaking down the organization into service components, and then making such components available to parties, groups, or other components external to the organization….