One of the lessons we learned while SOA-fying our legacy application (an Adabas/Natural monolith, that is almost 20 years old) is:
Make use of diversity.
When we designed the central interface for our service modules, we made sure that developers with different backgrounds worked together on the design team. For example, we had older and younger developers work together with Natural and Java developers. They all worked towards the same goal: creating an interface that all of our systems could use to communicate with each other.
We put together ideas from the “old” world – procedural data processing – and ideas from the “new” world – object and service orientation – and merged them into a flexible interface that combines the best concepts of both worlds. The more experienced developers brought their domain knowledge to the table and the younger developers added their new ways of thinking about the technical problems.
What we ended up with was an interface that could easily be provided and consumed from all the platforms we use. Because we put the interface to the test right away and made sure that problems would become visible quite quickly, we only needed a few iterations before the final design was ready.
And every developer that was involved in the process knew the interface already and could actively promote its usage to the rest of the team. And each of those deveopers could use the language they were already familiar with and didn’t have to teach new concepts – which isn’t that easy for both Natural and Java developers by the way.
So, my advice to you, if you plan to design a central interface, data model, or business process, is: Make sure to integrate as many different views and backgrounds as possible. The coordination might take a bit longer (at first), but you’ll probably end up with a much better solution.
If you make use of the individual strengths of your developers, the end result will be a well rounded solution.