John Crupi's Weblog

We're in the process of renovating our kitchen.  In our kitchen design, we're actually constructing a new structure to extend the current kitchen. If any of you have gone through this, I'm sure you have lots of war stories. But, as my wife and I go through this process,  I keep seeing similarities between renovating a kitchen and building a SOA.  To understand what I'm talking about,  I'll start by making some role comparisons:

Kitchen Renovation Roles	SOA Roles
Home Owner	Business Manager
Kitchen Designer	Business Analyst
Building Architect	SOA Architect
Construction Crew	Development Team

When renovating a kitchen there are usually four key roles; home owner, kitchen designer, architect and construction crew. In SOA, there are similar key roles; business manager, business analyst, SOA architect and development team. These four roles tend to have similar responsibilities as shown below.

Renovation Roles	Renovation Responsibilities	SOA Roles	SOA Responsibilities
Home Owner	Overall requirements and budget	Business Manager	Overall requirements and budget
Kitchen Designer	Kitchen requirements and design	Business Analyst	Business requirements and features
Building Architect	Overall architecture	SOA Architect	Overall architecture
Construction Team	Project construction	Development Team	Project implementation

The most important person in a kitchen renovation is the home owner. In SOA, the most important person is the business owner, who is usually the business manager.  Essentially, it's who owns the budget and writes the check.

You can renovate a kitchen without a kitchen designer, but I don't recommend it. Kitchen designers have the best  understanding of the requirements and features of a kitchen. Even building architects will tell you to bring in a kitchen designer to insure good flow, appliance placement, cabinetry, flooring, zoning, etc.

Similar to a kitchen designer is the SOA business analyst. Just as you can renovate a kitchen without a designer, you can build a SOA without a business analyst.  But, I also don't recommend this. The business analyst understands the business and business requirements and acts as a liaison between the SOA architect and the business unit. It's the business analyst who translates business requirements into information to help the SOA architect design the system. Kitchen designers tend to act as a liaison between the home owner and the building architect. Just like the business analyst is driven by the business unit has to support the business objectives, the kitchen designer supports the home owner's objectives.

Then there's the building architect who is core to the overall kitchen design. He/she is the one who has to take all the requirements of the kitchen designer and the home owner and turn that vision into a set of architectural blueprints. These blueprints are used for permits, cabinet sizing/layout, construction cost estimates and eventually become the master construction plans. If the blueprints are wrong or incomplete it trickles down to all levels and eventually ends up costing the home owner much, much more.

Finally, there's the kitchen construction team. The construction company bids on a project based on the complexity of implementing the blueprints, material and labor costs and a slew of other cost factors. You can probably imagine what can and will possibly go wrong in this model if all parties aren't aligned. If the homeowner changes the requirements mid-stream, change order costs incur. If the kitchen designer mis-calculates the cabinet dimensions and the cabinets don't fit, it delays the overall schedule, which translates to added costs. You get the idea. So much can go wrong if all stakeholders are not in complete sync in both the kitchen renovation and SOA world.