SOA and all that jazz

Most business executives know it pays to have interests—even passions—outside of work. These extracurricular activities help us relax from the pressures of work, and often that time away—whether it's two hours or two weeks—can inspire clearer thinking about job-related issues.

This hit home for me during my recent visit to ProcessWorld, the annual conference for users of the ARIS business process management software platform from IDS Scheer. The conference was opened by a jazz quartet featuring Dr. August-Wilhelm Scheer on saxophone.

Dr. Scheer blows a mean sax and has jammed in jazz clubs around the world, but music is not his main gig. He founded IDS Scheer as a business management software and consulting firm in 1984. He is chairman of the company's supervisory board, and its chief technology advisor.

His mini concert at ProcessWorld actually was part of a keynote address in which he explained why and how service-oriented architectures (SOA) can help companies create better business processes.

An SOA is a technology infrastructure in which software applications are broken into modular components—called services—and placed in a repository where they can be easily accessed either by users or other services. When this is done properly, a company can implement new business processes almost at will by writing procedures that call for specific sets of services to interact with one another.

After his band's first number—The Work Songby Nat Adderley—Dr. Scheer pointed out that an SOA gives businesspeople the same ability to create, and even improvise, that jazz musicians relish. He also pointed out, however, that even the greatest jazz musicians must follow certain rules before unleashing their creativity.

In a well synchronized jazz band, Dr. Scheer said, "Everyone gets to be a soloist while still supporting the other members of the group. This is done by adhering to the notes of the song, to the proper sequence and organization."

Even those improvisational riffs that jazz is noted for are not as impromptu as they seem, Dr. Scheer added. They generally are a mixture chords and chord progressions from the song being played. In jazz vernacular, these little nuggets of music are called licks, and most musicians learn and practice them to perfection before playing a concert. That allows them to put licks together in new and innovative ways—to improvise—when it's their turn to solo.

Dr. Scheer argues that businesses could use the services housed in an SOA repository in a similar fashion, but they must first create a workable set of rules for deploying those services. "You must strike the right balance between rules and improvisation," he cautions. "Too many rules will lead to a bureaucracy that moves too slowly for the pace of business today, but having no rules will lead to chaos."

The potential for chaos is why several groups—including one profiled on page 51 of this magazine—are working on what they hope will be industry standards for building SOAs. This group argues that its proposed set of standards will free SOA developers to create the functionality needed to implement new business processes, without worrying about how their services will communicate with services built in other languages, or on other technology platforms.

In other words, they would be free to improvise without worrying about throwing their entire business into chaos.