There is an incredible amount of noise and hype in the supply chain space right now about “SOA,’ or Services Oriented Architecture. Unfortunately, there is a problem with a whole lot of the noise and the hype.

Not that I don’t think SOA is important.  Having been one of the principle architects for what I believe was the very first SOA-based supply chain application (a warehouse management system) in the mid-1990s, I’ve been living and breathing SOA for a dozen years.  But the conversations that typically take place around SOA right now run the spectrum from techno-babble to partial truths to outright fabrications.  It needs to stop.

Here’s a quick primer on SOA.  The whole idea of SOA is to free the functionality of a software package from the confines of the application. We do this by creating logical bits of functionality called services.  A service, then, can be thought of as a piece of functionality delivered as a stand-alone ‘black box’.  Each individually identifiable black box is or can be decoupled from the application (doesn’t need the bounds of an application to execute).