Today, the fall seminar of Service-Oriented Architecture Subject Interest Group (SOA SIG) took place at the premises of OKO Bank in Vallila, Helsinki, Finland.

The theme of the seminar was Enterprise SOA and different perspectives to Service-Oriented Architecture. Paavo Kotinurmi, Helsinki University of Technology, discussed contemporary research themes, e.g. Semantic SOA, providing an academic perspective. Kimmo Kaskikallio, IBM, provided the perspective of a software vendor; his presentation was abot the life cycle model of SOA and how different tools can support it. Samuel Rinnetmäki, the Finnish Centre for Pensions, brought in the outsourcing perspective and reported on two biddings that FCP has arranged lately. Jouni Lähteenmäki, OKO Bank, represented the perspective of a solution developer and discussed the challenges of SOA development and management. Finally, I provided the perspective of a systems integrator and recounted experiences in BPM implementation projects of EDS.

The day was concluded with a panel discussion that I moderated and which was attended by Paavo Kotinurmi, Jouni Lähteenmäki and Kimmo Kaskikallio. Lähteenmäki viewed the information model of the enterprise as the prerequisite for Enterprise SOA, whereas Kaskikallio called for the interplay between business and IT as the key enabler and Kotinurmi expected the companies to be at a certain maturity level before taking the first steps. All the panelists acknowledged that SOA finds its most fertile ground in heterogeneous, rapidly changing environments.

For a while, the discussion took flight to an outer orbit. Kotinurmi predicted that the trend will be towards ever-easier networking and dynamic and semantic services. Kaskikallio added that, in the future, semantic rules engines will handle process variations in BPM.

I concluded the panel by asking how one should start to build a service-oriented enterprise. Lähteenmäki would start by modeling the core business: what things are modular. Kotinurmi chimed in and said that the technology, per se, should not be the driver, whereas Kaskikallio urged to call IBM.

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