This is a summary of comments I made in a panel discussion on Service Oriented Architectures at the Open iWorld at the IMS Learning Impact meeting.
Here are the slides that I used in the presentation.
Colin Smythe spoke before me and mad a number of great comments that suggested that SOA had been overhyped and was now in a bit of the “trough of disillusionment”.
I started my comments by suggesting that SOA (Upper Case) was pretty much dead and pretty much DOA. But at the same time “service oriented architectures” (Lower Case) were very much alive and well on campuses. We are using plenty of “services” – we just don’t see them as such.

I feel that people get in trouble when they conflate the following concepts: (a) Service Oriented Application – How to build one large and complex application, (b) Service Oriented Architecture – find shared software and data and build services and (c) Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture – Systematic move toward services across an Enterprise (or larger). The most common problem is that people see something like an Enterprise Service Bus as an Enterprise Service Architecture. If the ESB is single -language and comes from one vendor than it *automatically* has nothing to do with anything other than building a single application. It is “sad when an organization selects an ESB as its first step to an Enterprise Architecture.
The first video to view is the JISC eFramework video. This is an excellent overview of SOA – I use this in my SI502 class in our “API and Service Oriented Architecture”. The focus on this video is how to move from a single system holding data to sharing data between two and then many systems. It introduced the concept of a service layer which translates data to a common format as it enters and exits each of the systems.
The next important video to watch is Anne Thomas Manes of the Burton Group. This is my absolute favourite video about SOA. Anne starts from a perspective that SOA is a business problem not a technical problem. Some of her points include (a) SOA is a long-term proposition, (b) Having an Enterprise Service Bus does not mean you have SOA, (c) SOA is about data – not technology, and (d) SOA is an organizational