We’ve created a wall of jargon around IT. It’s time to pay the price.
I got a call from a reporter who was doing an article on SOA and wanted me to clarify some things. I told him I’d be glad to share my wisdom on the subject. He began by asking me to define SOA. “Oh boy,” I thought. “This guy doesn’t understand the simplest things. Where’s he been for the past three years? I guess it’s my duty to explain IT to the masses.” I took a deep breath and said, “Now, this is pretty complex, so listen carefully and take notes. "
“SOA stands for service-oriented architecture; that means you use services to orient your architecture. Are you with me?” “OK, but please explain what that means,” he persisted. I told him that you could think of all your existing systems as being made up of services. You could create new systems by recombining services you already have and writing a couple of new services. Presto! Whole new applications developed right before your eyes. Of course, you have to make sure those services are loosely-coupled so they bind properly at runtime. “Is this like code reusability, which IT people have been talking about since the mainframe days?” he asked.
