On May 5, 2006, at 7:11 PM, Charles Mosher wrote:
This could be addressed by generalizing the definition of "customer" and
"client" to include customers and clients within the organization, as
well as without. And I agree; it is often such internal customers that
first see the need and ROI for a service-based approach to the
integration of company systems.
I did notice that the concept of service partitioning, i.e., various
specializations of services from the higher level business
process/functional level (perform credit check) to the lower level
(retrieve customer record) is hard to describe with the layers as they
are depicted. In particular, services which can uniformly serve up data
(semantically and structurally mediated and rationalized) to business
services that are built on top of them are likely an important first
step to realizing a SOA system. These fundamental services are not
really represented in this architecture, where such detail is relegated
to the standards/implementation layer. There is the "thinking about
services throughout" admonition, which perhaps ameliorates this concern
-----Original Message-----
Sent: Friday, May 05, 2006 3:33 PM
To: Andras Szakal; Chris Harding
Subject: [soa-forum] RE: Definitions of SOA
I suggest an alteration to part of the definition enclosed with the
Having worked as an Architect for a number of organisations with 50,000+
personnel, the need to flatten organisations, remove silos and achieve
agility is a perennial theme. For organisations of such size, the
application of a service oriented approach to organisation and service
design of internal services is as valid to the application of S.O. to
the provisioning of external services. On slide 3, the phrase <business
layer> "A set of services that an enterprise wants to expose to
customers and clients" seems of exclude applying S.O. to the internal
design of organisations. I believe this to be too prescriptive. I
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-----Original Message-----
Subject: Re: Definitions of SOA
I offer this additional chart which depicts the outcome of our
last week. I am still working the chart but it's a decent start. We
that SOA is actually only one aspect of this very interesting industry
initiative that needs our focus.
I think we need to focus on service orientation as a superset of the SOA
discussion. In fact one could argue that service orientation may be
implemented by a combination of architectural styles and not just
(See attached file: Service_Orientation_Def_v1.ppt)
Chief Architect IBM Federal Software Group
Distinguished Engineer & Senior Certified IT Architect
Member Open Group Board of Directors
External Line: 202-595-1678
Service-Oriented Architecture CoP
AM "'Service-Oriented Architecture
As a further update, here is the definition of SOA that was presented at
The Open Group conference last week (and which we have shared with the
SOA is an architectural style that supports service orientation
A way of a way of thinking in terms of services and service based
development and the outcomes that services bring
A logical representation of a repeatable business activity that has a
specified outcome (e.g., check customer credit; provide weather data,
consolidate drilling reports), is self-contained and maybe composed of
other Services. It is a black box to consumers of the Service
The combination of distinctive features in which Enterprise Architecture
*The SOA Architectural style's distinctive features:
- Based on the design of the services comprising an enterprise's
(or inter-enterprise) business processes. Services mirror
- Service representation utilizes business descriptions. Service
representation requires providing its context (including business
process, goal, rule, policy, service interface and service
and service orchestration to implement service
- Has unique requirements on infrastructure. Implementations are
recommended to use open standards, realize interoperability and
- Implementations are environment specific, they are constrained or
enabled by context and must be described within their context.
- Requires strong governance of service representation and
- Requires a "Litmus Test", which determined a "good service"
At 20:31 04/05/2006, Cory Casanave wrote:
As an update from the OMG meeting last week, the SOA SIG adopted
following definition of SOA;
Service Oriented Architecture is an architectural style for a
community of providers and consumers of services to achieve mutual
Allows participants in the communities to work together with
minimal co-dependence or technology dependence
Specifies the contracts to which organizations, people and
technologies must adhere in order to participate in the
Provides for business value and business processes to be
realized by the community
Allows for a variety of technology to be used to facilitate
interactions within the community
The corresponding definition of service has not yet been finalized
but the sense of the group is that there would be both a
business/domain centric notion of service as well as an
In both cases this seems to fit well with the notion of SOA that
evolving in this group and in the SOA Demo.
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