At the end of the year, it's always interesting to take a moment and try to imagine what's next. In this case, I'm not thinking about whether the Patriots will win the Super Bowl, I'm wondering what comes after service-oriented architecture.
Although SOA has been dramatically hyped as the solution to cure all ills, it has still taken a good deal of time for organizations to adopt SOA in even a limited fashion. It's clear from its adoption by vendors as an integration strategy and by many IT organizations as a design philosophy that SOA will eventually be the mainstream set of architecture and governance principles for IT.
That doesn't mean that the ultimate goals of SOA have been realized. In an ideal world the concept of service would extend completely into the business - creating the service-oriented enterprise. In such a business, composite applications are created that allow the atomic services of the business - whatever they may be - to create powerful processes that are aligned with business goals and priorities.
In many cases to date, IT has selected SOA as an architecture, but we've yet to see line of business acceptance and overall corporate governance changes that mirror the IT work. It seems it's much easier to change code than it is to change organizational structure or political power bases. So the ultimate promise of SOA remains still in the future.
Nevertheless, my thoughts can't help but turn to what's next after SOA has been accomplished. I was having a conversation with a colleague, and our discussion spurred me to consider that the next step might not be new, but rather a revisiting of another previously explored concept - one-to-one marketing.
I'm not talking now about using SOA for marketing purposes, so don't worry. What I am talking about, and where I see the future possibly going is individualized, localized services. Services aimed at you, and only you; services that know where you are and are aware of your preferences, and perhaps a web of other preferences that interact with yours.
We got on this discussion while talking about portable GPS devices. As fellow travelers we both are in favor of those, but what got me thinking was that ultimately we may have some personal device - be it a cell phone, a GPS, or even some evolved form of a tablet computer - that will serve as our "consumer" for services. Not a computer as we currently consider them, but a device that does what we need and want, not what we don't. I'd like to have just one device, instead of the myriad that I carry now (personal cell, work cell, iPod, PSP, TomTom). But combining the devices really isn't the point - I don't want a game station, cell phone, music-playing navigation system. What I want is a device that can offer any of those, and more, as services to which I subscribe. I want to pick my cell carrier. I want to decide if I want movies on my device and which kind. I want the device to be my proxy in the great SOA continuum on the Internet.
Granted this is somewhat aimed at consumer services, but in the end almost all companies provide services, or would be connected to companies that do via the supply chain. The point is all of these "concepts" are services. I want navigation, but sometimes I also want to find a good Italian restaurant along the route from my client to the hotel so I can get a good meal after a day's work. Other times I may not want to take the fast route; I may want to take the route with the most covered bridges so I can see some scenic countryside. Conceivably I might want the game I'm playing to reflect that countryside (this assumes I'm not driving of course). I might want the soundtrack to reflect my musical preferences as well, even if it seems at odds with what I'm playing. In short, I want the ultimate consumer experience, courtesy of SOA. Some of this already exists; for the rest, we'll have to wait and see.