Most applications in an enterprise aren't designed to interact with other applications, much less exchange data meaningfully and work cooperatively with them.
Pat Helland, platform architect with the .Net Enterprise Architecture Team (NEAT) at Microsoft, summarizes these different efforts as HST: Hooking Stuff Together. "Finding ways to connect all the disparate systems that have been built—ways that allow for easy sharing of data, future expandability, and appropriate governance—is the greatest challenge enterprise architects face today,"
The Web services movement is tackling many of these issues. Still, we're far from a common definition of a customer or a purchase order, never mind achieving semantic understanding among applications. Helland believes such app-to-app understanding will be a major area of innovation.
For Helland, enterprise architects have an important part in this innovation. Architects must think across all the levels of their organization and partner organizations. "Architecting in isolation is no longer acceptable and is downright dangerous. Everything is, or will be, interconnected, and the ability to send messages everywhere—and ensure those messages are heard—is key to long-term success."
Microsoft has its own strategy about SOA, based on the observation that solutions are increasingly getting built out of pieces that interact through messaging—and that SOA is about reducing the assumptions required to get cooperative work done. "Microsoft first wants to help in the effort to define standards that make it easier to interoperate," Helland explained. "Plus, we are building support to make .Net the premier environment for developing and deploying services-oriented applications."
For many years, IT shops have developed in isolation, with independently created applications and little overlap in how things were done. Since applications weren't connected, this seemed of little consequence. However, recently it has become very practical to interconnect both the applications within an IT shop and those from other IT shops spread around the world. People can now easily browse and visit distant applications, as well as transmit data to remote applications. What remains difficult is getting the data to work across different applications.
"Connecting applications has been an afterthought, historically," said Helland. Yet, he believes that we're going to start seeing everything designed intrinsically to be connected. "Core platforms have to provide this capability in order to really make integration faster, cheaper, and easier."