I had a brief conversation this morning with Richard Katz about the state of Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures in higher education.
My going-in opinion was that lots of web services activity is happening in all sorts of places within institutions.
Richard’s take is that there’s a lack of progress on, or even discussion of, component based architectures for essential institutional services, and that the new large open source efforts like Sakai and Kuali are, to a large extent, rebuilding the same monolithic approach to business systems that we’ve seen from the commercial world.
These aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive conclusions, but I think there’s some work to be done to really ascertain what’s up with web services and component architectures in higher ed.
Any opinions out there?
