Do SOA and enterprise architecture now mean the same thing

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In a recent blog post, Joe McKendrick poses the question that I have been playing around with for a while regarding where and how SOA fits into EA.  He mentions that:

Dave Linthicum predicted a couple of years back that SOA would be absorbed into EA. SOA is just good EA, he said.

Do SOA and enterprise architecture now mean the same thing? | ZDNet

I agree that SOA is good EA done at the Technology Architecture level, but is unique in that it has more and more relevance to the Business Architecture with each passing year (as oppose to decreasing in importance)

 

He also poses this great question:

“Also, is it likely that all major technology expressions these days have elements of service orientation about them, so EA automatically = SOA on some level?”

I agree, but might turn it around to be : SOA can be an automatic part of EA if it driven by the precepts that are derived from EA at higher levels of the architecture.  It is possible to use SOA technologies to simply do a “better” version of PTP integration.  And, in fact, there is some value in doing that, but it is not relevant to EA at that level of maturity.  I talk about “Services” – with a capitol “S” – to distinguish them from “services.”  The difference being that Services have been vetted as being truly worthy at a Enterprise level.  That is where SOA appears on the EA radar.

 

Thoughts?



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