Gartner AADI – Moving towards Advanced SOA presented by Yefim Natis

An interesting concept is the idea of Software Oriented SOA and Business Oriented SOA. The difference being that one is technology focused and one is not. While it’s never accurate to break things down to only 2 sides, there is some value is evaluating your SOA initiative against this dichotomy.

This difference was noted as a “Thing to Avoid” in Yefim’s morning session here at the AADI conference. A Software Oriented SOA is one which is driven largely by the developers and “techies” as Yefim called them. There is little if any business alignment and services are viewed as software deliverables. A Business Oriented SOA on the other hand blends the technology with the business and views services as business enablers.

The results of these two approaches can and will be drastically different. Without a business focus, most SOA branded activities will ultimately lead to further disconnect and added complexity.

Obviously Yefim’s presentation covered much more than this but this one point resonated with me as I have personally seen instances of both types of SOA initiatives and I think you can guess which ones have been more successful.