In case you missed the news from last October (2007), former U.S. Vice President Al Gore was a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for his work to raise awareness of global warming.  Now, Al Gore took some good natured ribbing a few years ago for his misstatement about being the guy who “invented” the Internet.  But, somewhere in the dark corners of my brain I started thinking about the peace prize, the Web, enterprise IT and the adoption of SOA.  I realize this seems a bit disconnected.  Let me explain.

If you’ve ever worked in an IT organization with more than 1 employee, you know that people don’t always agree on things like:

·         How to problem solve (this include identifying the problems and then fixing them)?

·         What and where to invest (either from a strategic perspective or in terms of problem mitigation)?

·         What kinds of technologies should be used (this includes everything from operating system choices to programming languages and tools)?

Even if everyone agreed on these things within the organization, vendors continue to deliver differented products and new approaches to solving problems which then creates new things to argue about.  Even if consensus is restored, different choices are being made across corporate boundaries and then mergers and acquisitions take place throwing the whole organization into disarray again. The introduction of SOA and the underlying sets of implementation technologies was an attempt to see if there are some common principles, patterns, and specifications upon which the various stakeholders could agree to which would allow for the dust to settle a bit faster every time some kind of change occurred.

We are at War

-          Enterprise Architects and Operations people typically don’t like each other

-          Why?

o       Differing approaches to the same problems

§         EAs – want to work on new technologies to solve existing problems

§         Operations – demands stability in the environment so that things can be automated

§         These approaches are at odds with one another.

One glimmer of hope in the War

While the SOA adoption trend has largely been led by Enteprise Architects, the Operations folks have been leading their own trend; ITIL adoption.  ITIL v3 is largely service-centric and while the service catalog established as part of ITIL adoption is a superset of all services that IT offers (some of which may be based on SOA-based services or processes orchestrated via SOA), the motivation, language and underlying approaches that each of these groups are now adopting might have them spending a little more time at the water cooler together...

Can HP end the war by helping align the approaches through SOA and ITIL?

Isn’t this worthy of an IT Peace Prize?  Or perhaps an "IT Peace Prize" is something that HP should sponsor?