The debate on "Is SOA Dead?" started by Anne Thomas Manes of the Burton Group in her January blog has now taken a somewhat humorous turn. A number of enterprise architects rebelled and met on July 23 in Boston for a " Night of the SOA Living Dead" sponsored by ZapThink at the end of one of its ZapForum days.

Early this year, Claude Baudoin arranged a collaboration between the SOA Consortium and two students doing a master's thesis at the Copenhagen Business School under the direction of Prof. Rob Austin from the Harvard Business School. The students, Jonas Luttichau and Anders Dall, developed a "Service Oriented Enterprise Architecture Maturity Model" using Danske Bank as a case study. They have now completed their thesis, got the highest mark in the Danish rating system for it, and published it online.

The Object Management Group ( OMG) has convened a "Finaliz- ation Task Force" for version 2 of BPMN, which now stands for "Business Process Model & Notation" (not "...Modeling Notation"), stressing the fact that the model itself is now also a standard. The FTF is led by Mariano Benitez of Oracle, Ivana Trickovic of SAP, and Steve White of IBM, a show of unity from three major vendors that promises solid support for the new standard.

The SOA Consortium received 16 submissions to its 2009 Case Study Contest.  Judging is in progress (Claude Baudoin is one of the eight judges). The winners will be announced in September.
Meanwhile, listen to the podcasts from the SOA Practitioner Days led by the Consortium during several recent Gartner Enterprise Architecture events.

Radical (?) idea: non-IT executives (CEO, COO, ...), not just the CIO, should have an MBO incentive linked to a business-driven Enterprise Architecture program. This reflection was inspired by a tweet from Todd Biske, Enterprise Architect at Monsanto, author of the "SOA Governance" book.

This June 25 article by Betsy Atkins in CMS Wire touches on "information governance" and how regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley have pushed this concern up to the Board room. But it focuses too narrowly on the legal and regulatory compliance aspects: Master Data Management is also justified by quality and user productivity issues. As long as executives worry about information governance only to avoid jail or IT cost overruns, enterprise architecture will not be truly successful.

"Software as a Disservice (SaaD) sums up my angst in immature Cloud stack security today."

"I am interested in speaking with any hands-on architect who build large revenue-generating enterprise applications from scratch."