Adaptive Path Blog

Anyone been paying much attention to the world of Service-oriented Architectures?

Some coverage of it sounds very much like just another IT acronym, while other descriptions make it sound very similar to things we UX folks talk about:

“…the current uses of SOA for integration and customer- (user-) facing applications are merely the first stages of the service-oriented evolution. Over the next few years, SOA will be the springboard for innovative IT shops to move towards business scenario development [where] business solutions will be compositions of services, business events, and business processes. These compositions match the interactions of your business—with customers, partners, employees, and regulatory agencies—in support of commerce, collaboration, and information exchange.”

It seems that one way of looking at SOAs is as open APIs for information behind corporate firewalls. A lot of applications built on them amount to mash-ups and they certainly pre-date the current web 2.0 craze. Because they are built (often) for internal corporate use, we’re thinking they don’t have the public visibility they could have and often the definitions for SOAs and the applications built for them might betray their environment, i.e. documentation heavy and not necessarily user-centric.

Still, the thinking behind SOAs seems to be compatible with building services for customer and user scenarios you as a business want to support. I’ll be interested to see if any SOA cases arise that demonstrate strong support for great user experiences.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 19th, 2007 at 5:53 pm and is filed under Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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