Today, the foundational meeting of Service-Oriented Architecture Subject Interest Group (SOA SIG) within SYTYKE Association took place in Innopoli II, Espoo, Finland. Close to 30 people attended the event.
The evening seminar featured four presentations on SOA Governance from different perspectives. My presentation (available in pdf in Finnish) was entitled “How to Lead an Agile Enterprise?” and elaborated the theoretical ideas that I have also developed in this blog. Given the premise that an agile enterprise is flexible in adapting its internal organization to external demands and opportunities, I argued that BPM and SOA bring about the promise of agility, but appropriate governance mechanisms are required to coordinate people and IT assets. This is achieved by aligning service-oriented constructs with the inherent “requisite control structure” of the organization and establishing the governance organization accordingly.
Jari Kekkonen, Managing Consultant, Mermit Business Applications, gave a presentation (available in pps) on “The Return of Enterprise Architecture” and mapped SOA project artifacts to Zachman framework.
After the second cup of coffee, Paavo Kotinurmi of Helsinki University of Technology spoke about “SOA in Education and Research“. He cited IBM’s research in service science, management and engineering (SSME) and stated that the role of services is becoming increasingly important in education and research. It also appears that Enterprise Architecture is coming back in the wake of SOA.
The final presentation by Kari Parkkinen, Senior Adviser, SysOpen Digia, shared some practical experiences of SOA projects. Based on CBDI’s SOA Reference Model, he argued for dividing SOA organization into two offices: Demand Office and Supply Office, where the DO would represent business perspective and be responsible for ‘forecasting’ services and managing their life cycle, whereas the SO would represent technical perspective and manage the implementation of services.
