Any attempt to explain service-oriented architecture (SOA) to a business audience typically elicits one of two standard responses: "this is techie stuff; you should talk to my IT people" or even worse, "I don't see the business value." The irony, of course, is that service-orientation is a business approach for leveraging IT capabilities as business resources to meet the changing needs of the business in agile, cost-effective ways, and is thus critically relevant to today's business. But taking all the admittedly technical benefits of SOA, including loose coupling, composability, and reusability, and placing them in a sufficiently explanatory business context has always been a difficult challenge.
To rise to this challenge, ZapThink likes to use the analogy of Lego blocks. We feel the Lego block metaphor for business services is so powerful, in fact, that we put a picture of some on our home page. Whenever we introduce the concept of SOA, out comes the picture of the Lego blocks. We even recommend the Lego analogy to vendors who are looking for a way to explain SOA to businesspeople. As with any analogy, the parallels only go so far, but with Lego blocks, we've found four positive salient characteristics -- and four negative ones -- that serve to illustrate both the power as well as the drawbacks of SOA to any audience.
The four advantages of Lego blocks
The four characteristics of Lego blocks that are most appropriate for illustrating the strengths of business services in the context of SOA are the following:
There's little the business wants from IT that doesn't fall under the four characteristics above. The business cares little for how the blocks are constructed or why they do what they do. The business simply wants composable, reusable, interoperable, unbreakable components they can leverage in flexible ways to meet the changing needs of the business.
The downside of Lego blocks
As with any good analog
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y, the parallels extend beyond the positives, and also help highlight some of the limitations of SOA. Here are four examples:
Lego blocks and service granularity
OK, all you Lego fans, what is the best size Lego block? Clearly, if all you had were a box of the tiniest, one-bump blocks, you wouldn't be able to build very much. Similarly, if you wanted to build, say, a model of the Taj Mahal, you could (in theory) commission the Lego Group to custom-make a single Lego block in precisely the shape of the Taj Mahal. As long as your requirements didn't change, that bespoke block would suffice, but any change in your needs, no matter how slight, would necessitate scrapping the entire thing and starting from scratch.
The moral here is that fine-grained services by themselves aren't particularly valuable to the business, but services can also be so coarse-grained that they're too inflexible to meet the needs of the business either. The optimal granularity for services generally falls somewhere in the middle. Furthermore, ask any child what size Lego block is the best, and they'll look at you funny and reply that they really want a box with blocks of a bunch of different sizes. Just so with business services -- while the most flexible, reusable level of granularity is somewhere between fine and coarse-grained, in practice it makes sense for organizations to build a mix of services at different levels of granularity.
The ZapThink take
Technologists eschew oversimplifications as being unrepresentative of the true value of complex technologies, but business people appreciate straightforward analogies that both clarify complex topics while illustrating their salient characteristics. ZapThink has found that the Lego block metaphor actually goes over quite well with diverse audiences, and we even know a management consultant who brings actual samples to meetings with C-level executives.
If you find yourself in such a situation, try this: place some red blocks on the table, and explain that these are customer services. Next, place some blue blocks down, and identify them as operations services. Likewise with the yellow ones, which are manufacturing and delivery services. Next, single out a business process important to your audience, say, procure-to-pay. Assemble a mix of colors to represent that process. Now, what happens if there's a new regulation or competitor or logistical problem that requires a change to the process? Quickly add a block to your structure. What if you want to use the customer services from that process in another process? Reassemble the red blocks from your structure with other blocks on the table. You'll be surprised how quickly even the most jaded of executives gets the power of service-orientation -- and you don't even need to mention services, architecture, or SOA.
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