by Joe McKendrick
November 2, 2007 at 11:46 am
· Filed under Enterprise 2.0, SOA, SaaS, Web 2.0, podcasts
“They’ve turned SOA into a huge infrastructure project that takes years to come to fruition, and in the meantime, the business people don’t get much of a look at what’s going on. In a way, Web 2.0 is the business peoples’ revenge.”
-Phil Wainewright
EbizQ’s Krissi Danielsson has published a great overview of my panel discussion with industry luminaries Phil Wainewright and Dana Gardner on “SOA and Web 2.0: Mashups, SaaS, and Collaboration: Putting the Pieces Together.”
Dana and Phil agreed to disagree on the speed of the Web 2.0 and SOA convergence — Dana sees the two paradigms as “complementary,” and noted that many of the Web 2.0 techniques around rapid front-end application development can be considered a form of “Guerrilla SOA.”
Phil, however, cautions that Web 2.0 may be too uncontrolled and ungovernable to blend in with more deliberate and planned SOA methodologies. “I think it’ll be a few years before Web 2.0 and SOA really coexist,” Wainewright said. “Web 2.0 is so ill defined and people are still using it to experiment rather than with a definitive purpose.”
Both Phil and Dana agree that the combined forces of SOA and Web 2.0 will be tremendous market disruptors.
Perhaps SOA and Web 2.0 can both be categorized as Web-Oriented Architecture, or WOA. Dana put it best when he suggested that WOA perhaps should be called “Watercooler-Oriented Architecture.” After all, is this not where the REAL communication and information gets exchanged within organizations? “The social nature of Web 2.0 technologies tends to increase the sharing of experiences and wisdom as well, almost making a Waterfountain Oriented Architecture, ” Dana pointed out.
My Web 2.0-SOA panel discussion, as well as the other eight sessions that were part of the “SOA in Action” conference, are archived for on-demand listening here. (Free registration required.)
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I find Phil’s comment more than a bit humorous if not ironic “…people are still using it to experiment rather than with a definitive purpose.” Hmmm, sounds like the fundamentals of “emergence” to me.
That’s the point of the potential success of 2.0. Experimentation is a critical part of what it offers as a delivery mechanism. Experimentation is a fundamental principle of Design Thinking as a strategy for businesses to better embrace the complexity that they face.
Thus, the same reason Google insists on maintaining a lot of stuff in ‘beta’ mode.
Experimentation and squishy are the new ‘black’ for innovation. Companies need to be willing to figure out how to accommodate both innovation and secure-locked-down-stable operations. And those who can find the appropriate balance in making the latter even more squishy will differentiate themselves even more from their competitors.
Joe, sounds like it was a great discussion. Phil’s comment is provocative and I’m sure true — business people have never understood the complexity of building an infrastructure that can enable not just the narrow app they’re interested in at the moment but all of what the overall organization is trying to achieve. On the other hand, there are plenty of IT folks who are prejudiced to anything that doesn’t fit into their defined schema and probably deserve to be the focus of “revenge.” I’ve borrowed Phil’s quote for a blog post I just wrote on a related topic at http://advice.cio.com/abbie_lundberg/what_s_in_a_name_or_should_it_go_back_where_it_belongs and linked back to you here.
While it is true that the Web 2.0 front is still in experimentation mode, I agree with the comment that this is all part of an emerging technology.
In some ways I see a similarity here with the emergence of Agile development over the traditional waterfall methods – people were getting too frustrated with waiting long periods of time for delivery, and then finding that the business had changed before the system was delivered.
Experimentation allows for rapid changes of direction. In something new this is critical, as each new addition could push the business to develop new, and hopefully better, ideas which might not have been conceived in a large planned implementation.
There is definitely risk in this approach, and the chances of painting ones self into a corner are high. But without risk there is no reward, and surely the reward is what it is all about.
The CIO that is able to embrace these changes and help guide the business to a more complete, and controlled, solution by nudging them along the way is going to be see as an innovator. The rest of going to find themselves increasingly feeling like the King trying to order the tide to stop.
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