WEB 2.0 AND SOA: CONTRIVED OR CONVERGING?
It's been quite a week of discussion on Web 2.0 and its applicability to the enterprise. John Hagel did quite a write-up at the beginning of the week that was subsequently picked up by quite a number of folks (Nick Carr, Joe McKendrick, Dave Orchard, and Jason Kolb) including myself.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Web 2.0 debate had already been framed by a survey of the state of Web 2.0 and by a late-2005 inventory of its unresolved issues. This article narrows that broad discussion to whether Web 2.0 practices belong with SOA in enterprise settings.
John Hagel's argument drew responses from Nick Carr, Joe McKendrick, Dave Orchard and Jason Kolb, making interoperability and enterprise applicability a focal point rather than a purely consumer-web debate.
First-order effects
- Enterprise architects evaluating SOA gain a prominent set of arguments for treating Web 2.0 approaches as relevant to service-oriented systems rather than as a separate trend.
- Hagel and the responding commentators become reference points in the debate over how enterprises should connect web-style participation with SOA design.
Second-order effects
- SOA vendors and enterprise IT teams face greater pressure to explain whether their architectures support the interoperability and user-facing practices associated with Web 2.0.
- The discussion shifts competitive attention from labels such as Web 2.0 or SOA toward the practical boundary between enterprise services and web applications.
Third-order effects
- If the two camps continue to converge, enterprise software differentiation is likely to move toward how well vendors combine interoperable services with the workflows built on top of them.
The trend: Web 2.0 is being tested as an enterprise architecture question, with SOA serving as the bridge between web participation models and business systems.