Even though I believe that it has been too many manifestos lately and doubting their real value, I think that Herbjörn and the other authors of the SOA Manifesto have managed to capture important things about SOA in a concise way. Congratulations!
Their statements about what they have come to prioritize are mostly the same for any Enterprise Architecture (EA) initiative, but this is not a bad thing, rather the opposite. I believe strongly that a successful SOA must be based on EA and not be purely IT driven. Since I haven’t blogged about our (IRM) way of working with EA, I better make it clear immediately that I’m not meaning a multiyear initiative that produces models forever, but not any real value. An initial “get going” initiative shouldn’t take more than 8-10 weeks to complete and all EA initiative must deliver value as early as possible in an iterative way. I strongly believe that EA architects should provide support for the projects and not being a police with a stop sign.
UPDATE: After reading the manifesto a couple of more times, comparing it to the Agile manifesto and taking the time to also think it through a little bit more I would like to add the following thoughts. I think that the Agile manifesto has managed to get a little bit more concrete in their principals and that the principals in the SOA Manifesto has more room for your own interpretation. When reading it through the first time I applied the statements and principals directly on my own thoughts on how to do SOA and they fit well and I therefore thought they were good. The problem though is that most of them don’t add much of guidance for you and a lot of it could be applied on almost any software initiative. I also think that there is a gap between the statements and the principles. For example I can’t find many principles supporting “Business value over technical strategy”, except for “Identify services through collaboration with business and technology stakeholders” and “Verify that services satisfy business requirements and goals”. Of these the first is the only one that says anything at all, and even for that one the value is limited to make sure that it shouldn’t be just an IT initiative. Compare this to the agile manifesto which is much more concrete, of both what and how to do things, in their principles (for example “Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.”).
Another really unfortunate part of the manifesto is the first two sentences.
“Service orientation is a paradigm that frames what you do. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a type of architecture that results from applying service orientation.”
These two sentences say nothing, and especially the second one is stupid since it definitely says nothing.