current intro text

[Francis McCabe <fmccabe@gmail.com>]

At the core of participants’ interest in a SOA ecosystem is the concept of action – participants act in order to get their needs met. Critically, participants’ actions may involve systems that do not belong to them.

For example, if a consumer wishes to use a service to book an airline ticket for a journey, the consumer must interact with the airline reservation system in order to achieve the goal of a reservation. The consumer must be able to accomplish her goal using actions recognized by a reservation system that was designed to satisfy the policies and other assumptions about context made by the airline and those implementing the system.

When the consumer purchases a ticket, the action is to purchase the ticket but the means of doing so involves an interaction with the airline. However, both the interaction itself and the purchase are actions that must be understood at different levels – at the level of the IT systems through which messages are communicated and at the level of the reservation service through which the effects of the purchase are recorded.

There are many parallels between the way that human society is organized, and the way that humans can act using the power of others. There are also parallels in satisfying business needs and satisfying the mechanistic needs of the systems and processes that enable the bringing together of needs and capabilities to satisfy our goals

In this section we establish the key principles of action as an abstract concept. We elaborate on action in the context of acting in a social context as joint action. And we also establish the connections necessary between the different levels of understanding of action that allow participants to interact as a means of getting things done.