The SOA Manifesto published in 2009 contains a few references to SOA’s importance to business. If we take the idea of “business value“ or business related directives within the SOA Manifesto part of the SOA Manifesto as opposed to the Guiding Principles part of the SOA Manifesto we see that about 3 out of 9 statements relate to the business. Specifically, we have words like ”sustainable business value,“ ”Business Value“, and ”Strategic Goals“ in this section.

The Guiding Principles section repeats the same pattern of emphasis where the following lines may qualify as business related:

• Identify services through collaboration with business and technology stakeholders.
• Verify that services satisfy business requirements and goals.
• Evolve services and their organization in response to real use.

I realize that this 3 out of 14 record may not convince you that SOA practitioners are serious about business alignment despite their insistence to the contrary but this is probably better than it was before they made their statement. Even if the SOA Manifesto is weak business-wise it was probably necessary to say it and we can thank the signatories for their hard work.

Now we can move on as a community. Now that we have some agreement on SOA as a platform of thought maybe we can apply the same patterns that services bring to technology to other areas such as organization, risk, and business. Then we can also tackle the myth of a monolithic SOA definition.