My statement today is that SOA’s definition greatly lacks a business context. Even the term itself, SOA, feels monolithic in its application as if once size fits all. While SOA yields services for business, the community of SOA proponents has not included a definition of SOA along business operating models but along the model of their own technical experience and insight.

I’m tired of hearing about SOA as something in singular form when business reality indicates that it takes many forms. And it’s not just that different organizations have different sized SOA projects or deploy SOA to support different customer facing situations. It is that business operating models can differ so much that their respective SOA naturally differs by equal measure.

That difference means that SOA strategy from one company to another would be unrecognizable.

Look at a company that has absorbed other companies over time. It probably has a set of business and technology silos to deal with. Depending on how many customers these silos share, SOA will look quite different to this company than to a company that has a large catalog of products that its customers choose from,,, meaning that the catalog company has a large set of similar customers while the company that requires silos to support its customers is quite diversified. If business units don’t share customers then they don’t share customer data either. And if you’re not sharing customer data then you don’t need to share services do you?

In a diversified company one of the things that business silos can share, since they don’t share customers, is the technology base: network, servers, security infrastructure, application platforms. The reason for sharing these “services” in a diversified company is to support a single business goal: Reduction of Cost of Goods Sold.

So in what way would SOA apply to such a company? At the enterprise level it would apply in the areas mentioned in the previous paragraph: network, servers, security infrastructure, and application platforms. But these aren’t generally regarded as business services. They are technical services. Possibly some shared and centralized services could be built around HR, Accounting, and Sales Reporting. But this would take business ownership of business architecture and a vision of reducing costs across an organization that is organically divided to support its customers, in other words, to do its business.

SOA can still be used within a business unit in the usual way proscribed by SOA proponents as long as customers within the business unit are shared by the different product groups; otherwise, the same pattern of diversification appears at the business unit level.

The takeaway here is this: there is an enterprise level of SOA and possibly a divisional level of SOA. the extent to which, services are shared within a division. The enterprise level of SOA depends on the business operating model and how diverse the model is. The less diverse the more sharing of services can occur.

If you are a proponent of SOA you need to understand the business operating model implications and constraints on your SOA.