“It turns out that SOA is not a system integration problem, it is a social integration problem of getting people to play well with others.”

- Miko Matsumura, deputy CTO at Software AG

Simplicity is wonderful, and most companies worth their salt are pursuing strategies to better streamline, simplify and standardize their environments and the ways they do business. But the day-to-day realities of competition tend to get in the way.

As a result, efforts at IT architecture and SOA often resemble “Rube Goldberg“-type contraptions more than sleek, elegant systems, says Miko Matsumura, deputy CTO at Software AG. I recently had the chance to sit down and chat with Miko in the second installment of our ebizQ podcast series on SOA transformation, where he elaborated on the state of SOA in many organizations — and how this can be addressed.

(The full transcript is available here at the ebizQ site, and access to the podcast is available here.)

In most situtations, enterprises are built on “an imperfect environment where you have this company is being merged and mashed together and solutions that are just stitched together in very flimsy ways, because there’s no real opportunity to evolve standards,” Miko explains.Many of the pieces of the Rube Goldberg machine are tribes associated with the various silos, Miko says. If you can bring together the tribes into a common purpose, you can scale SOA across the enterprise, he explains.

The emerging social networking approaches will address this formerly insurmountable cultural challenge to SOA. “The whole social network becomes sort of inextricably linked to the evolution of SOA. Without the ability to evolve agreement you can’t even create solutions.”

Many enterprises have highly distributed teams that may even span the globe, from Mumbai to Memphis to Munchen. Along with employees, there are also contractors, customers, and suppliers that need to become more closely aligned with the process. “It’s really a social endeavor, it’s a social network…. Instead of dragging something down by the weakest link, we’re actually trying to drive out all the expertise and actually make something very optimal at the enterprise level. So we’re trying to solve the hard problems in system integration through social integration and we’re trying to be able to scale systems that way.”