In this podcast Chris Harding, head of The Open Group's SOA Working Group, discusses BPMN, SOA best practices and how SOA has grown since its inception. Visit the SearchSOA Podcast Library for more expert commentary.
In the first week of February, The Open Group held its yearly conference in Seattle. Harding said a big focus this year was on bridging the gap between the business and technical sides of service-oriented architectures. Since SOA was first created, people have spoken of it as something that would bridge the gap between IT and business. This, he said, has yet to happen in a major way.
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Business process modeling notation (BPMN) is a technical language used to describe business operations. But BPMN is a language for technical people, Harding said. It is not quite there in terms of fostering a joint business-technical approach, he said, because business people don't tend to think of processes in the same way as those in IT.
In general, SOA has become an established discipline with fairly common levels of expected granularity in defining services, Harding said. Over the years, he said, a number of good options for SOA training have come to light and the IT community continues to grow a body of consensus for best practices.
One of these best practices advises that architects and developers avoid hard-wiring services together. Harding said if you're going to use SOA, you should do it in the context of an infrastructure that has registry of services with messaging between them. In all likelihood, this is not the sort of infrastructure an enterprise would want to build for a small, one-of project.
