For several years now, ZapThink has spoken about SOA Governance "in the
narrow" vs. SOA governance "in the broad." SOA governance in the narrow
refers to governance of the SOA initiative, and focuses primarily on the
Service lifecycle. When vendors try to sell you SOA governance gear, they're
typically talking about SOA governance in the narrow. SOA governance in the
broad, in contrast, refers to IT governance in the SOA context. In other
words, how will SOA help with IT governance (and by extension, corporate
governance) once your SOA initiative is up and running?
In both our Licensed ZapThink Architect Boot Camp as well as our newer SOA
and Cloud Governance Course, we also point out how governance typically
involves human communication-centric activities like architect... (more)
ZapThink recently conducted our Licensed ZapThink Architect Bootcamp course
for a branch of the United States Department of Defense (DoD). As it happens,
an increasing proportion of our US-based business is for the DoD, which is
perfectly logical, given the strategic nature Service-Oriented Architecture
(SOA) plays for the DoD. SOA is so strategic, in fact, that SOA underlies how
the DoD... (more)
ZapThink's integration cost curve, which we published back in 2002, continues
to stir discussion amongst our Licensed ZapThink Architects. In brief, our
argument is that while traditional middleware-based integration leads to
unpredictable spikes in cost when business requirements change, taking a
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach to solving integration
challenges leads to a f... (more)
It may come as a surprise to our long-term readers that even after seven
years of talking about Web Services and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA),
ZapThink still has something novel and interesting to say about what a
Service truly is. But in fact, although we define the term repeatedly for
business, technical, and mixed audiences, there are still some subtleties to
the definition tha... (more)
As students go through our Licensed ZapThink Architect (LZA) course, they
experience a series of "aha" moments, as we systematically tear down their
preconceptions about what Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is -- and what
it is not. But perhaps the biggest aha moment of all, however, is when they
realize that implementing SOA isn't traditional systems engineering (TSE) at
all, but ra... (more)
Jason Bloomberg is Managing Partner and Senior Analyst at Enterprise Architecture advisory firm 
Doug Warren
Bob Snyder
Alf Pilgrim
Per Sjofors
Kirsten Lytsen
Data Recovery Services
Colin Armitage
