article glossing: Service-Oriented Horizontal Fusion in Distributed Coordination-Based Systems: Tim Bass Internetwork complexity increasing exponentially The resultant emergent behavior alters business processes and methodologies Everyone recognizes the insufficiency of our current/previous means of managing it all (IT resources etc.) SOA appears to hold promising answers Slide of Evolution of Business and Architecture (courtesy of IBM) We have much to learn from biological systems re: the complexity issues. Mr Bass enumerates 4 "net centric constructs" "-Unpredictable: The future is not unpredictable. -Interdependent: Critical information assets are controlled by multiple cooperating organizations. -Inadequate: Business and mission lifecycles are orders of magnitude shorter than system development lifecycles. -Emergent: The Enterprise is a boundless self organizing information ecosystem. Emergent properties are also unpredictable." Mr Bass asserts the following (which I'm not sure I agree with...?) "By definition, is not possible to predict the emergent behavior of complex systems." Regardless of the veracity of the statement above, his following observation makes sense, that the underlying IT architecture lifecycle is outstripped by business and mission process lifecycles. Let's look at "self organizing characteristics of complex biological systems" (yay, finally to the meat! :-p) Mr. Bass enumerates the following 4 "Biological and Social Models -Self-organization and scale free networks -Small world theory and hubs -Information ecosystems and markets -Keystones, dominators, niche players" these mimic the biological models such as ant colonies, bird flocking, genetics, swarming insects) Emerging complex systems approaches: - Hubs -JDL data fusion model -Functional Service oriented architectures -SOA as distributed blackboard architecture References: Englemore, R. and Morgan, T., editors, Blackboard Systems, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1988. Zmud, R., “The Designing Organization in the Netcentric Economy,” Netcentricity Symposium, Decision and Information Technologies, R.H. Smith Business School, University of Maryland, March 30 and 31, 2001. McManus, J., “Design and Analysis Techniques for Concurrent Blackboard Systems,” Ph. D. Thesis, The College of William and Mary of Virginia, Accepted April 2002. Bass, T., “Service-Oriented Horizontal Fusion in Distributed Coordination-Based Systems,” IEEE MILCOM 2004, Monterey, CA, 2 November 2004. | 
