Enterprise Architecture versus SOA?

Enterprise Architecture versus SOA?

In a provocative post yesterday, David Linthicum suggested that Enterprise Architects should be fired if they don't appreciate SOA Service Oriented Architecture. Not surprisingly, this is resulting in a hostile response from people (Uche Ogbuji, Mark Nottingham) who are saying that it's not Enterprise Architecture that's the problem, it's SOA Service Oriented Architecture. Or rather the Service Oriented Architecture SOA vendors. Mark (who used to work for BEA) blames the Big Vendors.

I have some major concerns with the way Service Oriented Architecture SOA (or some watered-down version of SOA Service Oriented Architecture) is being implemented in large organizations, sometimes with the encouragement of vendors. But I don't think all the blame for this can be placed on the vendors. (Hey, they're vendors, what do you expect from them?)

I also have some major concerns with the way Enterprise Architecture is being implemented in some large organizations - talking endlessly about Business-IT Alignment but reduced to playing meaningless games of Framework Bingo.

In our consulting work, we are increasingly finding that effective SOA Service Oriented Architecture and effective Enterprise Architecture go hand-in-hand - you probably can't do a decent roadmap or business case for one without considering the other.

I think David Linthicum raises some good points in his post, but I don't agree with his conclusion that you should fire enterprise architects who don't appreciate SOA Service Oriented Architecture. It is probably true that some enterprise architects don't deserve that job title - but it's not because they don't appreciate SOA but because they actually aren't very good enterprise architects in the first place.

I have generally found that good enterprise architects are eager to address the issues that matter to their organizations. This certainly doesn't entail (why should it?) an uncritical acceptance of SOA Service Oriented Architecture. In my earlier post on Optimism (in reply to Jeff Schneider) I said that "it is not the role of the architect to be optimistic". But it does entail striving for a flexible and joined-up and cost-effective architecture. Frankly I can't see the point of an enterprise architecture if it doesn't do any of the things on David's checklist.