SOA 2.0

There has been renewed discussion of Web 2.0 around the blogosphere this week. Tim O'Reilly posted a schematic diagram Web2MemeMap onto Flickr, and published a long article What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software on his website. Several of the blogs I read have linked to either or both of these, and some of them have copied the diagram.

Many of the elements of Web 2.0 are highly relevant to service-oriented architecture and the service economy. In this post, I want to extract two sets in particular.

Loosely coupled systems of systems	Small pieces loosely joined - web as components Granular addressibility of content Software above the level of a single device Radical decentralization
User-centric	Users control their own data Rich user experience Trust your users Emergent - user behaviour not predetermined Customer self-service - enabling the long tail

If we apply this kind of thinking to SOA, a distinction emerges between SOA 1.0 and SOA 2.0.

SOA 1.0	SOA 2.0
Supply-side oriented	Supply-demand collaboration
Straight-through processing	Complex systems of systems
Aggregating otherwise inert systems and providing some new communication channels	Frameworks, applications, agents and communication channels understanding each other more deeply. Building a smarter stack and designing applications to take advantage of new constructs that (we hope) promote agility and simplicity.	Erik Johnson via Dion Hinchcliffe
Single directing mind	Collaborative composition
Controlled reuse	Uncontrolled reuse	See my earlier posts on Controlling Content and Shrinkwrap or Secondhand
Endo-interoperability (within single enterprise or closed collaborative system)	Exo-interoperability	I am currently preparing a longer paper on interoperability and risk. See my recent posts on Efficiency and Robustness. (1, 2)
Cost savings	Improved user experience	This is one of the areas where SOA starts to get interesting for the business and not just for the technologists.
	An emerging network-centric platform to support distributed, collaborative and cumulative creation by its users	John Hagel

There are some other elements of SOA 2.0 that I intend to discuss in subsequent posts.

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