Post a Comment On: Network of Things

If you ever get into a conversation which discusses use cases of SOA, then you have probably heard of the Purchase Order (PO). The use case goes something like this, there is a PO which needs to be routed across multiple enterprise components (recently exposed as web services) and this PO needs to find its way to its destination through a maze of business processes. It seems every one has a policy which says "if the PO is greater than some dollars then send it to big boss otherwise the little guy can do it as well".

So abstracting the use case out a bit, we are saying the PO is the input into a black box and some processing occurs and the PO changes the state of the black box and returns a zero or more messages saying so to the originator.

I have yet to hear someone question this use case in context of the vision of SOA enabled datacenter. I always wonder why the PO even has to even exist. After all in the world of SOA, multiple systems are now connected at the application level and supposedly understand the business processes extant in the organization.

POs were created because the buyer and seller had no other way to account for a transaction. PO was the document that implemented the approval process, the actual transaction and the budgeting process. If the underlying IT infrastructure is moving towards loose coupling, the overlaying business processes would need to be reengineered to take advantage of this new infrastructure.

I think the biggest opportunity in SOA might end up in the laps of management consultants. Perhaps, I should have stayed at Booz.Allen ;)