What About Architecture Anyway?

Confusion about Services Based Architectures [SBA, SOA, EDA, ...] has been created by a number of industry elements. Industry critics like Forrester first used the term Services Based Architecture until 2000 when Gartner came up with their own term Services Oriented Architectures (SOA).  Forrester was still using the term SBA in 2002. Gartner next created the term Event Driven Architecture and has now come full circle back to SOA 2.0 (supporting both SOA and EDA like the original SBA).

Industry consultants have interwoven the concept of Web Services into Services Based Architectures where the two have some very basic differences. The experts have confused even the sharpest of architecturalists into wondering if Web Services are really a Services Based Architecture. How about the new term "Web Oriented Architecture", is this different?

Another area of confusion was added by software vendors who have created products in the space and touted “services ready” components without understanding that to be included into an SBA, all of the components must be defined (metadata, models, etc.); but this is something that most vendors (IBM, Microsoft, BEA to name a few) would not dare do since this is their intellectual property that they are selling.  Who would sell you all the goods so you would never have to come back for more (Microsoft as a corporation is an expert at this type of sales tactic)? Even information architecture vendors, such as Informatica, are now touting the integration of services into their ETL tools (what they should be selling is real-time web-service callable interfaces rather than “SOA compliant”. Software providers use the term SOA, EDA and Web Services often without regard to the actual underlying foundation required by each.

So as any reader can imagine, even the term Services Based Architectures has been brought into a “trough of disillusionment”. Why is there so much confusion about a simple concept?

I just completed renovations to my house and I used an architect - he helped me through the maze of complicated interconnections - roofing, electrical, plumbing, etc. Do we as IT executives think that we can connect the dots in an enterprise of applications without some sort of architecture?