Scott VanDenPlas

Decoupling of services from technology will continue to evolve into communication

As the results of our communications are becoming more complex, there is a necessity to simplify the building blocks of the system into modular pieces to be reassembled in flexible and complex manners. Service Oriented Architecture is an extensible design methodology that reduces our complex organizations into manageable pieces, and it also happens to be an horribly defined buzzword. The piece of SOA that is interesting in this context is the communication possibility between the service modules, and also the methods that they use to communicate, specifically in the area of Business Process Management.

Process management is a technology solution to handle communications of human to human, human to machine, machine to machine, and machine to human. Process management systems aid in the design, execution and management of a specific set of interactions and rules. The most interesting nature of this technology is that it allows us insight into how we design communication systems. We manage communication between machines in the same manner that we manage communications between humans. We do not allow systems to define their own communications parameters to each other, not because they are not capable of doing so, but because we may fail to understand how or why they do it. It is entirely possible that we will allow machines to make the decision on how to communicate to each other and allow that communication to be different than how machines communicate to us. We can be willfully ignorant of the method, but fully informed of the result.

When two devices communicate on a network, they already do a low level of communication negotiation. The two devices initiate a conversation, decide on the parameters of the conversation, and then manage the flow of information from one to the other. They do this now within the confines of human rules, we tell them what their options are and allow them to make the best choice from those options. When we decouple services, the available options to a service are tremendous but still well defined. I imagine that at some point, we will need only to define the results we seek and not the method used to seek those results. We can leave the method up to the devices or services communicating to each other. At this point, not only is the the communication system used invisible to the end user, but the method of communication is now invisible to the communications designer.