WOA wasn't important to me last week

I spent last week working with a couple of my enterprise customers. The time was focused around the Shared Service Center (formerly known as the SOA Center). Here are the big issues that we worked on:

- Improving the help desk for production implementation problems related to shared services

- Improving the ability to perform root-cause analysis for service exceptions

- Getting funding to pay for a better staging environment

- Changing the way we engage with large I.T. programs so that they don't get bombarded by 5 different CoE's

- Changing our 'service discovery' process to make it easier to project ROI for shared services

- Identifying a new set of processes that support organizations will have to follow if the business application requires high availability: "Gold, Silver, Bronze SLA"

- Modified and communicated changes to our "Service Architecture Document" in order to provide consistency in documentation detail

In my world, SOA refers to the organizational politics necessary for an I.T. group to perform their job efficiently.

SOA has evolved from 'web services' to 'an architectural style' to 'an enterprise architecture framework' to 'a specialized I.T. lifecycle and supporting organizational design' - to 'all of the above'.

If WOA wants to encompass the aforementioned activities - I want in. Until then, WOA is just a cool thing for analysts, press and marketers to talk about. Debating the HTTP verbs might seem like 'real architecture' to some but I am genuinely concerned that a 'shiny object of misdirection' is taking our eye off of the real problems.

WOA wasn't important to me last week and it won't be next week.