Key points for me:

• SOA aims to tackle the problem of too much cost and redundancy in enterprise IT
• If you develop a capability, it should be reusable across your applications
• You want to avoid building monolithic applications
• SOA is something you do not something you buy
• Having an Enterprise Service Bus does not mean you have SOA
• SOA requires an organizational lifestyle change; You have to apply the principles across all the projects in the organization
• SOA is a long-term proposition, on the order of 10 or 20 years

Those last two sort-of make my eyes bug out. Do you know anyone in technology that makes 20-year plans? My feeling is that our organizational hierarchies simply prohibit cross-cutting changes like this in the enterprise. Either the CEO is demanding this from every division, or it won’t go forward.

I do think the principles are interesting. IT is such a young industry that we are learning for the first time what it looks like to have 40 years of cruft in your infrastructure. Certainly anything that begins to scrape away the barnacles should be good for the organization.

Here’s a small series of humorous episodes related to recent Blackboard and Open Source Learning Management Systems. The mashups are made with snippets of classic Hindi Bollywood films, overlaid with user created subtitles, from a fun online tool called BombayTV from Grapheine. The role of Blackboardwala is played by none other than Amitabh Bacchan, of course.

http://metamedia.typepad.com/metamedia/2008/04/the-adventures.html

The Spring Framework has come to be synonymous with enterprise Java. It’s a great example of the cream rising to the top in an open source “free market.” I think I’ll attend Wednesday’s webinar on Spring 2.5.

I think the reason it takes so much time is that open source systems are not just different products, but an entirely different kind of product. Open source is as much an approach to systems as it is the systems themselves. Rowell rightly points out that it’s not about saving money, since you’ll need staff to take a much more active role in your software strategy than they had before.

Another good point is that we can’t very well expect our instructors to start hacking the code themselves; It’s not what they’re here to do and it’s not what they’re compensated for.

Those of us in the instructional technology business need to make it our mission to amplify teaching. We should be able to put tools in the hands of our faculty to let them do what they already know how to do, but better, faster, and further.

This is a tangent, but here is the video where a young Steve Jobs says, “[A computer is] the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.” This is a very worthwhile 60 seconds of tape: