This was the consensus view of SOA panelists at the recent OASIS Symposium in San Francisco. One of the panelists, Robert Carpenter, senior program manager at Intel Corp., summed up the problem by saying valuable as HTTP, XML, SOAP and UDDI are to SOA, talking in those terms is not going to excite management. He urged architects to focus on business values.
This view was reinforced by Forrester Research vice president Randy Heffner, in the closing keynote at the OASIS meeting. He told his audience that SOA will only advance if IT and business people can find a way communicate and work together.
So the question is how to bridge the gap between the IT technologists and the business manager, who may only think of SOAP as something to use in the shower?
