O SOA mio

Despite all the millions spent on SOA marketing, it seems that most of us are none the wiser about what it is. According to a recent survey.

More than 50 per cent of business respondents and about 25 per cent of IT respondents had no knowledge of what SOA was and therefore the benefits that could be derived from evolving towards one.

That said, the SOA definition that the survey used is:

SOA is a technical environment where business flexibility is supported through the use of technical components or services that can be re-used and brought together to form additional, composite services that work in accordance with pre-defined security, service level and other policies to facilitate business processes.”

Definitions like this don’t really help anyone understand anything. 

1.  It is a grammatical form of water torture.  There should be a Geneva Convention to protect us from this kind of thing.

2. Even once you have swallowed the excessive passive the sentence means absolutely nothing. It loops around on itself.

Perhaps we should start a campaign for plain english in IT.  Any takers?  We could do an award for the worst paragraph in technology marketing, on similar lines to this award in literary circles.

I worry though that it would be another IT award that SAP could win.