SOA, City Planning, and Other Social Metaphors- Why Meta Matters Meta Principles for IT-Business Alignment

摘要

The software industry is abuzz with excitement over promises that Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) will provide unprecedented business value by containing IT complexity, aligning IT with business, and facilitating IT agility, while also spurring a momentous paradigm shift towards virtualizing and "uniformly" connecting disparate software programs at the business-logic layer. The key to achieving these goals is the rise of a meta (horizontal) service infrastructure layer/business application framework. This nascent but pivotal concept is illustrated through insights drawn from social metaphors that are time proven and illuminate the importance of being meta.