Since the topic for this blog posting is Enterprise Application Architecture and since the title of this blog is Enterprise Architecture for SMBs, it seems fitting to analyze one of the critical elements of an Enterprise Application Architecture, that being SOA, for small and medium sized businesses.
Reflection 1: Small and medium businesses: We simply don't need SOA
The first article which I want to reflect on explores the position that SOA isn’t necessarily important for SMBs. The reason offered is that SMBs do not have the application complexity and diversity that large enterprises have. I currently work at a $60 million business which has two primary lines of business. Each line of business has a primary back-office system (one is custom-built, the other is commercial) along with shared commercial finance and CRM systems. That’s about it - definitely not complex, so the article has my attention.
The article references an informal survey of mid-market CIOs which reveals that two-thirds feel there is no business need for SOA at their enterprise. This opinion may be due to an overall simpler IT environment that “works” or it may be due to limited resources (people and budget). Whatever the reasoning is among these CIOs, I think the informal survey provides an accurate representation. The article is from six years ago, but having worked at SMBs for the past nine years, I think the opinions expressed in this 2010 article are still holding true in 2016.
Further into the article, however, the author chooses to pivot from the opinion of the mid-market CIOs and offers some of his own reasoning on why SMBs should care about SOA. He says:
Of course, the mid-market is the prime candidate for cloud computing, and this is where the value of service orientation will ultimately be realized, on an enterprise-to-enterprise scale. But for applications within the infrastructures of smaller enterprises, SOA is still beyond reach.
Still, the more a business of any size can service orient, the better. SOA is an extension of enterprise architecture, and EA is important at any level.
I’m in agreement with the author and I think the first paragraph above is very telling. Even six years after this article was published, I can attest that for many SMBs, running a solid, well-managed data center is beyond their capabilities. With the data center yoke around our necks, the notion of implementing a service-oriented architecture is accurately stated as beyond our reach. We need to get out of the data center business, move to the cloud, and then start innovating with our Enterprise Application Architecture.
For my second reflection, I want to remain on topic with SOA at SMBs and get some additional perspectives on why SMBs can, and should, move to a SOA. The article being examined is actually a series of responses to the question “How Can Small to Medium Sized Enterprises Benefit from SOA?”. Most of the answers lack substance and depth, but there were a couple of comments that I found very relatable. In the posting from John Power he states the following:
However, from my perspective the real benefit to SMBs is the possibilities it offers them to integrate their systems with large customers or suppliers.
This struck me in two ways. First, it struck me for its accuracy. It has been my experience that invoking a few web services and standing up a few of our own in order to integrate with our suppliers and partners is exactly what many SMBs do for their SOA initiatives (without going much further).
The second manner in which it struck me was how it reinforces the confusion and hype around SOA. Integrating with a handful of external businesses through web services in no way constitutes the deployment of a broad service-oriented architecture. However, I will state that those simple external integrations are extremely valuable to SMBs and they work well, leading many CIOs, I reckon, to conclude “that’s good enough for us”.
The other posting that caught my attention was from Kelly Emo. She states the following:
Secondly, SMBs will find themselves brought into the SOA world whether they explicitly plan for it or not. Packaged apps and SaaS solutions are rapidly evolving to be architected based on the concept of loosely-coupled shared services...
This claim is also very accurate in how it matches my SMB experience. It is the packaged applications and SaaS solutions which SMBs utilize, that essentially forces them to eventually learn and leverage the service orientation built into those commercial offerings.
It seems the ultimate takeaway for me is that SMBs will adopt SOA gradually (even glacially) and very deliberately, avoiding big-bang transformations. If resistance persists, then, to the point made by Kelly Emo, SOA will likely start deploying itself in the enterprise.
The third article I want to reflect on comes from the Lesson 2 reading material for EA-874. This article seemed like it would be a fitting cap to my SOA-themed blog post. I expected the article to largely espouse the virtues of service-orientation for building applications. In other words, the author just wants us to replace the traditional locked-in business logic of the middle tier with services that can be invoked throughout the enterprise.
The author quickly reminded me, however, that replacing the locked-in middle-tier with services still leaves us with a three-tiered application. So, my assumption about the article was wrong and I was suddenly wondering what new trend all the SMBs will be lagging behind on now.
It turns out the author is not actually recommending that we retire the three-tiered separation of concerns between user interfaces, business logic, and data access. He, in fact, states that we need to continue reinforcing the three-tiered separation of concerns. All the author is saying, as a natural evolution after implementing a SOA, is that the user interfaces of applications should no longer be homogenous and monolithic - they should be a collection of components supporting many devices. These user interface components will invoke many business services, and these business services will invoke many data services.
Keep in mind that all these pieces are still to be architected with the separation of concerns being resolutely applied. We just need to stop thinking about single applications as a homogenous three-tiered stack and instead start thinking about them as a collection of user components and business services that cannot be easy abstracted as a nice, neat three-tier stack.
The bottom line is that the separation of concerns (user interface, business logic, data access) is not going away, but simple, self-contained applications are. All in all, not too big of a paradigm shift for SMBs to work toward...once we start making more progress on our SOAs.
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