Deliver Order from Chaos

"Another point I want to add is that SOA has been mainly an IT-driven activity. To a large extent, we’re looking to IT managers to sell transformation to the business, and often, it’s something beyond the scope of many IT managers’ responsibilities or organizational capabilities. And, actually, IT managers shouldn’t be selling 'SOA' to their businesses, they should be selling improved or streamlined processes."

"What you want from an entity service is business orientation (e.g. an order or customer entity vs. CRUD like operations), federation (aggregating disparate but related data), high performance (such as caching federated data) and abstraction (data structure and location hidden from the services). To incorporate these features into entity services without commercial software is very difficult and as a result several software packages have emerged that Forrester categorizes as Information Fabric."

"So who’s on first, SOA or Web oriented architecture (WOA)? These Web-facing trends for the time being may remain outside the strict boundaries of enterprise IT — but they are of great interest to developers, ISVs, welling Web 2.0 services start-ups, and cloud compute purveyors."

"One of the questions I came across while building Data Warehouse applications is whether reports should be run on pre-calculated and pre-formatted data like OLAP cubes or directly on a copy of live databases. Either way requires a fundamental understanding of the underlying data structures."

"A Forrester Research paper I read recently stoked my interest (again) in the canonical data/information model, a once hot pursuit that seems to have cooled down in recent times. In short, the paper states that the canonical information model excludes "at rest" data (legacy systems of record, packaged applications etc.) but includes information in motion (messages, service invocations, etc.). My first instinct was to disagree with this definition."