The Zen of SOA - Service Oriented Architecture

SOA Plus BPM = a new enterprise architect vantage point?
In my experience (prior to SOA, as well as recently), many enterprise initiatives begin with a single solution or approach. While SOA is more of a journey (hence, my perspective that SOA is a mindset as much as a set of technologies), that trip has to start somewhere. And for many of our clients, that journey starts where there's the most pain. Thus, a solution is proposed for specific business concerns -- not, "We need SOA, so let's dream up a situation that we can apply it to...."

We've seen many (medium- to large-) organizations gravitating towards service orientation in the
enterprise. Which makes perfect sense for IT management and architecture reasons, reducing redundancy in software development, and other areas. My approach, as solutions architect, has been to look for the business process touch-points -- to get people and process to align. Bluedog's agile approach to development seems to be copied at many of our customer sites. This bodes well for a change in the way IT is perceived. The goal of many of our solutions is to give geographically-dispersed staff access to enterprise information and applications.

In browsing the net, I cam across this interesting discussion about business process management and SOA in relation to manufacturing. http://cpd-associates.com/blog/pvm/bpm-soa/ This strikes me as an important area of consideration, especially when the author discusses the nature of services -- not being transactional, but iterative. It is these very same interactions Knowledge Workers face daily: version controlled interactions, involving knowledge capture and sharing through some problem solving context.

Image from http://www.npccmauritius.com/ SEO Tools