Ed
1. Regarding
business Services in SOA, I am surprised to see your omission of Manufacturing,
ERP, Supply and Value Chain related business services in vogue in Industry
today that have emerged beyond what historically started as web services!
2. Even
for financial sectors (Basel II) in many areas such as for insurance and loans,
the business services are being implemented.
3. Yes
there is some hype and the real danger is “spaghetti code” but business
functions, business processes and business models as well as performance
monitoring all benefit from business componentization and related services.
4. Information
services will be highly importance for cross agency communication and citizen
services in the Governments.
5. A
comment on how manufacturing logistics and transportation costs are reduced by
using (business) communications and information services and actual delivery of
material at the point of use has a large information or business services component.
In the days of no cell phones, one had to often trace a person by visiting or
finding them if they were away from landlines thus cross service enterprises
will continually increase use of business services for overall material cost
reduction and for efficiencies in integration costs.
Thanks.
Ravi
(Dr. Ravi Sharma) Senior Enterprise Architect
Vangent, Inc.
Technology Excellence
Center (TEC)
8618 Westwood
Center Drive, Suite 310, Vienna
VA 22182
(o) 703-827-0638, (c) 313-204-1740 www.vangent.com
Professional viewpoints do not necessarily imply
organizational endorsement.
-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Ed Barkmeyer
Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2008 11:25 AM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Cc: c.harding@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] The
Open Group SOA Ontology
Ravi Sharma wrote:
> SOA deals with all three at least, namely -
Business - Information
> (applications and data) and Technical services to
cater to the whole
> enterprise. The business services are catering to
business components
> that can be grouped into business functions.
Example of technical
> service is a web-service for message delivery or
for notification or
> service for network related management, security
services, etc.
This is the hype version of SOA, whose purpose is to
sell webservice
implementations (read: "new software
technology") to management, and
allow a bunch of pundits to sell books and
"newspapers".
The services that we know how to implement with
software, and the only
ones that are really implemented, are all relatively
simple technical
services that are pure information technology.
There are two major
exceptions to this:
- financial services -- because they are
*entirely* information
technology (there hasn't been any substance there
since the G7/8 went
off specie-backed currency, and the requirement for
specie reserve
affects only financial policy, not financial
transactions)
- media (books, newspapers, music, video) --
because they are now also
entirely information technology (even though they are
still evolving the
business practices to deal with the fact that there is
no longer a need
for any physical media to change hands)
Business management in general isn't going to invest
much in yet another
software networking technology -- we have had our 3
strikes. So the SOA
folk have to say "business", even though
what they can envisage never
gets out of the .com think of 10 years ago.
Ken Laskey got it right:
> I find it useful to differentiate between a
business service and a SOA
> service. Business services are described in
the more traditional
> sense of providing a business function, yes with
predictable business
> outcomes, i.e. real world effects.
------------------
That is, there is some material or labor involved in
changing the state
of the physical world. The software itself does
not do that. It could
conceivably control devices that do such things, but
the real-time
control community has had functional distributed
systems technologies
for at least 15 years, and doesn't need the
high-overhead re-invention
that is SOA technology. And unsurprisingly, the
same is largely true of
the finance industry and, more recently, of some
highly visible elements
of the media business.
> A SOA service is an IT artifact that *may* be an
effective way to
> realize that business function.
Specifically, when that function can be fulfilled
solely by the
communication of information.
> Conversely, SOA will be inappropriate
> and have no role in certain business functions.
Even though these functions can be implemented as
"business services",
like building maintenance.
Thanks, Ken.
-Ed
P.S. I should say that this takes nothing away from
the TOG and OASIS
work in producing clear models of the complex
distributed systems
concepts that are now called SOA. Such models
will be of great value in
educating the technologists of the next decade.
And with luck, they
will stop the recurring reinvention of this wheel and
the re-learning
that that makes necessary. I just think
responsible technologists
should separate the wheat from the marketing chaff
when dealing with a
technical audience.
--
Edward J.
Barkmeyer
Email: edbark@xxxxxxxx
National Institute of Standards & Technology
Manufacturing Systems Integration Division
100 Bureau Drive,
Stop
8263
Tel: +1 301-975-3528
Gaithersburg,
MD
20899-8263
FAX: +1 301-975-4694
"The opinions expressed above do not reflect
consensus of NIST,
and have not been reviewed by any Government
authority."
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