You are right though, with all the extreme rightists out there you would think that the left would have someone who can go out there and give a reasonable debate over today’s issues without childish, personal attacks. They need a voice of reason, a person competent enough to discuss issues and policies instead of lobbing insults.

Groovy and Grails are really very new. After reading the similarities to Java and Smalltalk it doesn’t surprise me that it caught your attention though. What database are you building on? Will we be able to see the YMS project on NoString as you build it?

Allen Taylor

Thanks for the comment and I completely agree with your thoughts. The point I wanted to make in the article was that I felt Oracle found themselves in the same position as many of their customers. They faced many of the same issues and I thought they came up with a good solution.

You make a good point about XML, BPEL, Web Services, etc.. As an Enterprise Architect and even more so as a CIO these technological components are of little interest. I would expect the Enterprise Architecture to be completely vendor and product agnostic. I really wouldn’t want my architecture team to make any recommendations based on vendor relationships however. I expect to see true standards based conceptual and logical models in the architecture design. The onus is then on the vendors to prove that their products will work within your environment and support your direction.

I agree with you that the business doesn’t care about SOA or any other IT concepts nor should they. I believe, however, that we should stop viewing IT and the business as separate entities. The CIO should be a part of the business, they simply have a different department and set of tools at their disposal for delivering value to the organization. For some reason this seems to be a big problem in many organizations and I struggle with why, to me it’s just common sense.

SOA is indeed a small part of the equation and in fact not a necessary one, particularly from the business perspective. You are certainly correct in your point about the challenges in changing the IT organization mind set from app-centric to service-centric. I have always found it interesting that as business and technology has changed over the years one of the biggest challenges is invariably getting IT to change.

I find it interesting that your organization is now being driven what you describe as a Business Capability and Master Data Management solution. That is much more in line with a true Enterprise Architectural model. It would seem you have the business specific process models on one side and business master and meta data models on the other with the technology architecture in the middle. Which standards and practices are used within the app delivery, information delivery or technology infrastructure of the technology architecture are not important.

Thanks for the insight.

That fact that Oracle is a great vendor for you in that their business relationship is solid from both technology and strategy is very good for you and your buisness. But, as a CIO saying that they are best of breed in SOA is confusing for me – especially from your previous post (SOA – Win, Lose or Draw).

Should a CIO be worried about XML, BPEL, Web Services? Shouldn’t you be concerned on how your Enterprise and Solution Architects recommend and standardize technologies based on your vendor relationships and vendor management team? Should you really care?

I don’t think the buisness cares at all about SOA just as long as you can provide IT applications and services on time and on budget (or better). If SOA is part of that answer, then great!

SOA standards is only a small part of the equation. It is really about aligning your IT organization to support a shared services approach (moving from app-centric model to a service-centric model). I would think your challenges would focus on how you can get your Oracle Financials, JD Edwards and Peoplesoft support teams to think in terms of service management, monitoring, and support.

As we have moved through some of the SOA lifecycle we’ve seen a shift in our own direction – away from SOA as a technology solution and more to a Business Capability and Master Data Management solution as the primary force. As we started to dig deeper we found that our service definitions really are part of data management and if we continued without that focus, our services would only exacerbate the legacy data problems.

Anyway – thanks for the posts – interesting to hear from your perspective.