Sometimes It's Just Too Late

Down in Florida for Progress' annual sales kickoff meeting and using the opportunity to visit my grandparents. Needing a car to get around, I rented a low-end model from Dollar/Thrifty, an Actional customer. Normally, the car is full featured but this time, I got a car without power locks. No big deal, right?

Saturday morning, I went to the mall, parked, had breakfast, sat in Starbucks and caught up on email. When it was time to go, I realized the problem with not having electronic locks.

I couldn't find the car.

You see, I didn't really pay attention to where I left it. I figured I could walk around, punch the alarm, and move towards the beep. I ended up having to walk the aisles looking for a red Dodge.

This weakness in my plan would never have occurred to me until I experienced it... at which point it was too late to do anything about.

SOA what? You've got similar challenges with SOA management tools. You don't really know what you need until you need it and it's not there. Unfortunately, once you've put the SOA infrastructure in place, it's too late to compensate and you must do without (or find a work-around).

It's important to think things through carefully, but realize that you're going to miss something. This assumption makes your decisions about architecture way more critical than individual features when it comes to product selection. Features can be changed (quite easily in fact) but they are limited by the capabilities, performance and scalability of the underlying architecture of the solution.