Why SOA -- or something like it -- is important

Lev Gonick is the VP of Information Services for Case Western Reserve University and serves on the board of the OneCleveland initiative.

In a recent blog post on the the future of my favorite Rust Belt city, Gonick offers this assessment of how the digital world we thought we knew is in the midst of a massive upheaval:

For this generation, empowered by pervasive access, the internet has moved beyond a network of computers. It is, not to sound a cliché, a network of people. All over the world, more than 1 billion people are becoming empowered consumers, co-creating, collaborating, communicating and creating a global web 2.0. It took 15 years to reach the first billion internet users. The next billion to be connected to the Net will take only half as long and the impact will be powerful. Are we ready? This is a generation for whom email is passé, creating web pages are what your mother or father did, dial up is the equivalent for them as the horse and buggy for people of my generation. There are nearly 100,000 podcasts in iTunes. YouTube has over 100 million videos watched daily representing more than 60% of all videos watched on line. There are more than 60 million blogs with over 1.3 million entries and another 100,000 new bloggers being added to the rank of the self authoring voices on the web. Myspace has over 100 million accounts, and Flickr, the web 2.0 community's archive of community photographs has more than 4 million users.

The word "agility" gets tossed around so much in the discussion of SOA that it has lost its meaning. That's too bad, since the ability to adapt to a rapidly changing world will be an ever more important survival skill for any business. Anyone with a stake in the development and application of software will do well to keep that in mind. Maintaining the status quo is a tar pit.