SOA, the two speed architecture

I was in a discussion today with Ruud van Vliet about the two worlds that SOA seems to deliver.

We noted that SOA delivers a slower world of core competences, core services, that need to have high quality and robustness. Typically these services are delivered in cycles or releases of 3 months+. In most enterprises these services are hidden in heritage (nicer term than legacy) systems currently and must be freed gradually.

And we noted a fast world of Mashing up, Composing, Integration and Process Flow, in which changes can be done by the day. This is especially seen in the Web 2.0 world, where mashing up (combining and remixing) existing data and services on the web is a trend. Typically new services are and can be delivered in minutes or days.

This might result in new roles in the information landscape. On one side communicative, fast business analyst that can configure new experiences for the business in short periods of time, reusing existing services from a service repository. And techies, that deliver new core services on a longer timeframe.