Phase Two of SOA: Let's not get caught up in the acronym this time

If you missed last week's eBizQ SOA in Action virtual conference, you'll want to download and listen to the presentations, especially the keynote from Forrester's Randy Heffner who declared that SOA is far from dead. He also points to some very interesting data about the rise in SOA governance, the top SOA mistakes and what it takes to make a SOA effort successful.

As you may know, WebLayers did participate in a roundtable discussion, SOA Valuable is Unreachable Without Governance with Software AG that was led by industry pundit Joe McKendrick. Regardless of the vendors at the table, what really came through in each presentation was the fact that SOA is moving into a new phase.

In fact, Joe McKendrick aptly summarizes it as Phase 2 of SOA where SOA moves out of IT shops and becomes more entrenched in the business. Where, in my opinion, it always has been (or at least should have been in order for it to be successful).

But the bigger question I have is do we still have to call it SOA? If this phase two is going to really take hold in the boardroom, it has to find a more succinct and direct way of illustrating its value to the business in terms that can be more easily digested. What that term may be is still TBD. However, as the infrastructure continues to evolve, the terminology around it will become less relevant when compared to the value it brings to the organization.

Of course, the IT folks may still call it SOA. Meanwhile, business units may suggest a hybrid or cloud environment to support the SOA. And the CEO may be simply asking for a way to get information from point A to point B without any interruptions.

So this next phase isn't going to be so much about SOA as is about building the IT foundation that provides greater visibility, mitigates risks and streamlines business processes.

What we really need to be thinking about at this point is how to manage the infrastructure across the board as opposed to specific initiatives such as SOA or cloud.

From the initial idea and design stage through the actual building of the infrastructure and on-going evolution there needs to be a better way to organize and oversee the development so that this next phase of SOA (or any new initiative that's introduced to the infrastructure) will actually deliver on the business benefits it touts.

We're calling it distributed governance though would love to hear your thoughts on what we should call this next phase of SOA - and if we call it SOA at all.