Defining the Undefinable
Posted on February 1, 2007
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0 are two concepts that have gotten an incredible amount of press in the past year, both in IT industry media and corporate IT. Part fact, part hype, part buzz, part reality, part theme, part meme, part concept and part tangible, these two terms share one important attribute:
They are very difficult to define.
If you ask 10 different people to define SOA or Web 2.0, you will get 10 different answers. For the most part, all of the answers will be right, and all will be wrong.
For corporate IT shops (and Marketing and Advertising and other departments who might touch the Web 2.0 concept), I posit that you shouldn’t spend time ‘figuring out’ the definitions of these terms. That approach won’t scale – different groups within the organization will end up with very different (and often orthogonal) interpretations.
Rather, I suggest that organizations educate themselves as much as possible on these concepts and then:
Define what they mean to your organization.
These definitions should be developed internally (IT is the best candidate to spearhead) and then evangelized horizontally, across the organization. In the case of SOA, this is important because it is an overarching concept, with integration and sharing at the very heart of the idea (at least in my definition) :). It’s very difficult to build an effective SOA without the organization having a unified view. In the case of Web 2.0, its possible touchpoints extend across IT, marketing, product development and other business areas, making a common definition important as well.
Once these terms are defined, the business can build their Web 2.0 strategies and IT can design their SOAs. By marching in lockstep with your cross-departmental peers, your organization can best take advantage of these powerful yet vague terms.
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