Wow...it takes how many people?!

OK, so while I don't usually like to criticize other folks' approach to all this SOA stuff, I just read something over at soainstitute.org that just absolutely blew my mind.

The point of that article is purportedly to get across the appropriate staffing mix to have a successful initial SOA implementation. There are no fewer than 10 separate types of people described therein ranging from architects to security specialists to "archivists" to governance specialists and more. Even if you figure that on a "small" project of this type that a single person can serve multiple of those roles, it's a pretty daunting list.

I'd argue that it's precisely this sort of approach to SOA (and enterprise technology in general) that scares away and/or confuses the lion's share of consumers. Further, if you're not coming at an engagement like this with a set of tools and technology that decreases the need for all these different "specialists," then I think you're doing a disservice to your customer/partner. Heck, if your customer/partner has all those kinds of specialists at their disposal and/or has the money to have you staff them, then they are in a tiny majority of companies in the world.

These kinds of technology (SOA, BPM, EAI, ESB, et. al.) cannot and should not be the sole possession of larger or well-funded organizations...and telling people they need a team of 10 or more "specialist" roles (some of which later in the article we hear we'll need multiple) will only cement the idea that these things are just too complicated/expensive/rarefied for little ol' me. I don't think that's the message any of us should be sending, and I certainly hope that "experts" in this domain will start to realize that there are plenty of good solutions out there to help make it a lot less complicated than indicated in that article.