"Service orient or be doomed"
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Jason Bloomberg & Ronald Schmelzer's book explores the impact of SOA on the business and the IT department.
By Jason Bloomberg & Ronald Schmelzer.
Published by John Wiley & Sons.
Price £25.99.
ISBN: 0471768588.
Just in case the bombast of the title is not enough of a clue, the authors of Service Orient or Be Doomed waste no time in setting out their illustrious stall. This, the reader is told, is “the most important business book ever”; and soon they hear that, in comparison, all other business titles are mere “get rich quick manuals” or “even losers [like you] can get a job” guide. Technology management books fare even worse.
For a book that promises to raise the bar of business literature to such new heights, however, there seems a particular reluctance to get to grips with its subject. Readers have to reach the 100-page halfway point before there is any serious attempt to define service orientation – let alone any explanation of how it represents a sea change in IT.
In the build up, they are treated to a potted history of all that is wrong with IT today, stopping off via often-amusing – though hardly revealing – descriptions of why commercial train rails (at least within national boundaries) are set at standard gauges. And while the authors attempt to ensure that a complex subject is explained simply by using regular ‘Jargon Watch’ boxes to breakdown issues, even the most technology-illiterate readers would surely question the need for a quarter-page explanation of the term ‘techie’.
This preamble harms the genuinely valuable discourse that follows: during the latter stages of the book, there are thought-provoking and interesting explorations of the profound impact that the adoption of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) will have on business and the IT department, changes that will enable both to evolve into highly agile and responsive entities.
The text would also benefit from some real-life examples: one short case study focused on an unnamed company does little to substantiate the authors’ predictions of IT damnation for companies that fail to take the service-oriented path.
The authors have billed the work as something that the CIO should be able to give to the executive board with a cover note saying, “This explains our IT strategy”. It would take some judicious pruning – or selective photocopying – before any CIO would be advised to follow that advice.
