Lately there have been a lot of skirmishes between the various IT Advocacy Tribes - EA's, SOA Zealots, BPM Adherents, Data Minions, and such. The trouble is that everyone seems to think that their approach to solving the problems of IT is the "one true way in a dark and misguided world". So we get posts opining that SOA is dead, or BPM is too much change to be effective, or EA is too cloud-centric - and not in a good way. There has to be a happy medium between the various disciplines - after all, Nash proved that coopetition is far more efficient than competition a long time ago now. Perhaps we can check the sensationalism at the door and recognize that there may be smart people on the other side whose solutions are more appropriate in some perspectives of the overall problem.

This really hit home as I've been reviewing TOGAF version 9. A lot of good thought has gone into this release, but I can't help but think that they forayed into spaces that already have good problem definitions and appropriate solutions available. If The Open Group could have just focused on the Architecture Framework in version 9 without spending a lot of cycles on solving the Business Model, but rather formalizing the interface of their framework to accept the various solutions already in that space. Would that be Service Oriented thinking? Of course, that would imply that The Open Group understands encapsulation as a concept to be applied outside of technology!