The Failure of SOA Standards!

You will have heard the joke before: “The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.” Sadly in SOA land this is reality.

The need for standards in SOA are multivarious including standard concepts so we all speak a common language, standard meta models that underpin profiles, repositories, deliverables, specifications etc. standard protocols that allow implementation and platform neutrality for service publication and consumption. In this note I am interested in concept standards that support architecture and the full life cycle.

In this area we all know we have three “horizontal standards” organizations (OASIS, The Open Group and OMG) that have each followed their own path, ignoring the blindingly obvious need to have consistency across their work. The situation is so ridiculous that the three organizations resorted recently to publishing a document to explain how to navigate around the SOA architecture standards. Curiously although the document is branded by the three organizations and acknowledges participation and contribution from all three organizations, the document is formally a joint OASIS and Open Group document. One might be forgiven for assuming they couldn’t agree the legalities of the collaboration. Also the document doesn’t address inconsistencies between standards and guidance produced by the same organization.

The document declares two goals – 1) to help users to understand the strengths of each body of work and select products appropriate for their needs. 2) to encourage consistency. But the latter is declared only as a secondary goal!

But inconsistency is only part of the problem. We must judge any standard in its support for the user community and crucially user adoption. The primary purpose of these standards under discussion is achieving common definitions of important concepts and simply put they have failed to achieve widespread adoption because of the competing efforts have confused the user community. Further individual efforts have in my opinion failed to meet user needs.

• While TOGAF is getting considerable traction our experience is that the parts of TOGAF that get used are the ADM and the contracts. Not the concepts and meta model, because they are patently not based on real world experience. They are both too verbose for some purposes and insufficiently detailed for others. And the guidance for use is non existent.
• Similarly the OASIS model is widely regarded as academic – not useful in practical application.
• I have more respect for the OMG’s work in SoaML, because it is usable in support of code generation, but it suffers from over generalization, which makes it very hard to use by mere mortals.

I observe that in the referenced “navigating” document the nearest the authors come to agreements on core concepts is at the most superficial level. I see no evidence that there is any real intent to deliver real convergence at a meaningful (i.e detailed, defined) level of abstraction.

Over the years CBDI has encouraged standards efforts; we have consistently made the case that common concept standards are essential at all levels of abstraction. We didn’t just sit by; we developed our own meta model which actually predates most of the work referred to above, and made it available to standards bodies. Frankly we fully expected that our work would be superseded by the standards work and that we would progressively align our SAE models to a converged standard.

Well you won’t be surprised to hear that the complete opposite has happened. This month we are publishing V3 of the CBDI-SAE Meta Model for SOA. We have actively participated and contributed to the OMG SoaML work and we are pleased to announce a high level of alignment. This is possible because of the highly generic nature of the SoaML work.

The CBDI-SAE meta model has always been very different to the various standards bodies work. We have focused on what may be termed a detailed Business Type Model (DBTM). The goals of the DBTM are to provide consistency of concept for use across the life cycle at a level that can be implemented in tools and inform practical architecture and full life cycle deliverables. And of course users of the CBDI-SAE meta model tell us that is exactly what they use it for – populating architecture and service repository schemas, underpinning UML profiles and defining detailed of deliverables that can provide full life cycle traceability and governance.

What we didn’t anticipate at the outset was that our meta model would actually form the basis for a further purpose – to provide a mapping between the other concept standards such that users forced to work with multiple conceptual schemas (few of us live in a homogeneous world) would have a basis for coordination and possibly transformation.

So as a user what do you do? Currently we see minimal use of these concept standards because they are inadequate. We recommend that you continue (or commence if you are a late adopter) using the CBDI-SAE meta model. We will commit to map to the other standards and, if and when they ever get to a credible position of convergence, we will certainly plan model convergence also. But we will need more than alignment of the concepts, we will need to see practical abstraction and detail required for real work.

We will be announcing a user review of the V3 model very shortly and welcome all input.

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Navigating the SOA Standards Landscape Around Architecture, Copyright The Open Group 2009, OASIS 2009,

V3 SAE Meta Model note this is currently for CBDI subscribers only. Public domain version follows shortly for the review.