Service-Oriented Architecture

I'm currently embroiled in the long and fraught process of having telephony and data services installed in a certain location. One supplier steadfastly and consistently refused to respond to my offers to become a paying customer, so I selected another who were very responsive at first, but have become less and less so over time. In fact, it's about two months since I signed and still no service has been provided (although bills have been sent).

Part of my frustration with this is that it's very hard to find out what's going on. The company, a British telecoms provider and let's leave it at that, was once a monolithic monopoly but now has been dissected into multiple different business units, components, we might almost call them, each—I suppose—focussing on its so–called Core Competence (and more on that in a later post). Each of these components has its various workflows that it does and one or more contracts with other components for services it supplies or consumes and the components communicate by passing electronic messages to one another. Sometimes they pass electronic messages to me, complete with the URL of some other component where I have to go and do some action. It's all very slick and automated and orchestrated and, indeed, seems to have a mind of its own.

For instance, the putting-in-wires component received a message telling it to come to my location and do just that. Unfortunately, the agent of the no-I-mean-really-putting-in-wires component to which they delegated implementation of that action was not able to complete it. He sent a message saying so and various exception flows kicked off, requiring a lot of manual intervention, oh yes.

Meanwhile, the arrange-for-telephony component turned out to have a clock running and when a certain (unpublicised) duration had elapsed without it receiving a notification of success from the putting-in-wires component (which was busy with some recovery actions on the no-I-mean-really-putting-in-wires component) it triggered a flow that cancelled my original request to have some services. A notification was received by one (but not all) of the taking-money-off-you components and one of them sent me a message telling me that my order for some services had been cancelled. A good thing, because otherwise I would have been blissfully unaware of the situation. On the other hand I am now angrily aware of the situation.

Now, here's the fun bit: irrespective which component sends me a message, no agent working for that component can explain to me what the message means, because whatever it means that meaning belongs to whatever other component sent the earlier message that lead the the message I received being sent. And no, they can't put me through to an agent in that component. There is no interoperability layer.

Today I spoke with five agents in three different components. One of them gave me quite the run–around because although I had contacted him through the callback given in the message I'd received from his component I had mis–configured part of my message header leading to my message being dispatched to the wrong agent because I had misunderstood the published specification for that header which he freely admitted was itself a shoddy piece of work with unreasonable and misleading contents but it was still my problem that I'd botched the message send.

Also, I've learned that to get to speak to an agent at all I have to go twice around the loop of failing a handshake because I can't provide a piece of data that the protocol requires but that I won't get until the request succeeds. After two failures in a row a supervisory process notices and I'm failed over to a more generic service through which I can contact an agent, but that service is not exposed on a public URL.

To all of which I say: bring back the mainframe.