Bruce Taylor recently spoke with Mike Rosen, a Senior Consultant with Cutter Consortium's business IT strategies and the enterprise architecture practice areas. The topic: Web services and service-oriented architectures. Following is an edited transcript of that conversation. You may also listen to the original interview here.

Hi, I'm Bruce Taylor, and welcome to Voices on ITworld. Our guest today is Mike Rosen, he's a Senior Consultant with Cutter Consortium's business IT strategies and the enterprise architecture practice areas. As a former chief enterprise architect himself, he has over two decades of experience in leading the design and development of software products and applications. Besides his consulting, Mike is a frequent contributor to such publications as the Web Services Journal, EAI Journal, Software Magazine, and Enterprise Development. And he is the co-author of a book Developing E-Business Systems and Architectures, a Manager's Guide. Mike, welcome to the program.

Mike Rosen: Thanks a lot, Bruce, glad to be here.

Bruce Taylor: Well, first, we're here to talk about Web services and service-oriented architectures, so if you would, just to bring us all onto the same page, give us your clearest, most concise definition of what constitutes a service-oriented architecture.

Mike: I'll try to be concise, but I think that there are many facets to a service-oriented architecture. So when we talk about Web services, and the service-oriented architecture, mostly we're thinking about the aspects that allow us to actually connect services up to the communication's infrastructure and have one service talk to another service. And in the past decade we've had a lot of trouble with that. Previous technologies like DECOM or CORBA were just too hard to master, too complex to successfully implement service-oriented architectures. So Web services give us the opportunity for mere mortals, or most IT organizations to actually successfully implement services at a technical level. What I focus on in a lot of my enterprise clients is not creating services, but making it possible to combine those services together in the context of the larger enterprise. And that brings us an additional set of challenges and issues beyond simply Web services. So my definition of service-oriented architecture is an architecture that enables independent groups in an enterprise to separately build services that can be later combined together to form higher level value inside of an enterprise context.

Bruce: Sure, so that would imply, that as you are developing a service, that you are developing it with that in mind, that eventually it has to be tightly integrated with other services.

Mike: The idea is certainly that we want to tightly integrate the services together. But what we're trying to do with the service-oriented architecture is give the lines of business and the individual groups in an enterprise enough flexibility to actually build services that are valuable to them, that meet their time frames and business drivers. So the real challenge that we face at an enterprise level is providing just enough context so that these services can be combined together, but not so much

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