Preaching on Broader Notions of Services

So I had a great time presenting today with Brenda Michelson of Elemental Links (and former Chief Enterprise Architect for LL Bean), Dean Ostergaard of iCST, and Eric Ryan of Oracle on the topic of Service Oriented Architectures. The other presenters did an outstanding job discussing the benefits of SOA and the steps needed to get there, and I left that in their capable hands. For my part, I tried to do something a bit different.

While I touched on the benefits of SOA, my real mission was to try and get people to change the lens a bit as far as the definition of a service. You all have heard the message before here, and today’s chat was essentially the verbal version of that piece.

One great moment for me was when, in an effort to try to elevate the discussion from the theoretical to the practical, I asked a simple question – “How many of you are using either Active Directory or an LDAP directory?” Nearly every hand in the room went up. That, I argued, is a service. Got a couple of slow nods. It’s not often thought of in that context, I went on, but it’s a horizontal service to applications in need of it, and has explicitly exposed APIs. More nods, a couple of people writing. One convert at a time…

So overall, the reaction was surprisingly good, and no one told me I was off my rocker. We got some great, insightful questions from the audience (my favorite? “Services have been mostly discussed as an opportunity for big businesses – should smaller businesses care?”).

Anyhow, the deck is mostly just a bunch of pictures, but if you’re interested you can grab it here. Note that it’s in Powerpoint format, as I only use Open Office for deck touchups. The presentation component of OO, IMO, is the weakest link in the bunch, and I use it as little as possible.