I very recently took a new job working in an Enterprise SOA environment after having been out of this space for the last three years. Even back then, I had been working on developing an ESB product set (at webMethods), which is different than being a consumer of an ESB. For this reason, I thought it would be a good idea to read SOA for Dummies.
I needed a refresher on SOA. The book was free at Software AG’s (which acquired webMethods) website. At 100 pages, it would be a quick read. Finally, I had recently run into Jignesh Shah (one of the authors) who I had not seen in some time.
Apparently there are a lot more politics in an IT organization than I had been aware of (I have had different software jobs, but have never worked within IT). This book covers a lot of the real world politics around rolling out an SOA organization. This is not as applicable to my situation given the maturity of SOA at my new job.
A couple of points:
- Start small, preferably with a single but key project
- Align reward systems with expectations, above and below, in order to be successful
- Though written by a lot of SoftwareAG/webMethods people, this book did not seem to be particularly oriented toward webMethods
- It does not deal with SOA architectures (as it clearly states up front)
Overall, I was not the target audience for this book, but if I was looking to move my organization toward SOA, it would have been a very valuable book.
