SOA, It’s not about the IT It’s about the Business.

Coming from pure IT background I can understand the discussions about the right way to implement SOA at enterprises, but the reality shows that the right way to adopt SOA is to convince the business side regarding the necessity and contribution of SOA to the business. Let’s face it, IT is just a tool or enabler for the business to reach it goals and objectives. In a matter of fact since IT serves as a tool to manipulate the enterprise information, it’s always reflects the situation of the enterprise information. The enterprise information is affected by the way the business is running, therefore there’s a direct influence of the business on the IT.

Therefore you can find a great or a bad IT architecture and use it for the IT side, but if you manage to solve IT problems without solving business problems you’ll probably fail. We are all familiar with the IT spaghetti that all the IT knights tried to solve. But have you ever thought why we end up with this IT spaghetti? Maybe this spaghetti is a mirror of the business spaghetti! If this is the case it doesn’t matter which IT architecture we’ll follow. The right solution here is to re-architect the business side first. 

People like the analogy between city planning and enterprise architecture, so I’ll use this analogy to prove my point here. The business architecture of enterprises is similar to the city planning decisions made by the city mayor and the city committee. If they have wrong decision regarding the distance of the city international airport from the city, it doesn’t matter which architecture the city planner will use for transportation and human (Information), buildings (application) or roads and railways (infrastructure) the city still have a problem. Just after re-architecting the “Business” the problem can be solved.

The problem that we face today is that SOA is a technical architecture pushed by the IT but not polled by the business side of the enterprise. The ironic part is that the ideas behind SOA might help enterprises business to re-architect the business side and to solve the business spaghetti. This business spaghetti that will prevent us, the IT guys, to reach successful SOA based IT solutions. 

If you’re running SOA project or thinking about one you should have an enterprise architecture team that will support you through this process. Remember, without the ability to make business changes your SOA project will be probably doomed to fail.