Two articles recently crossed my feed and got me thinking on the upsides and downsides of SOA, and I decided to share this with you. I’ll start on the high note, that way if you get tired reading my post, at least you get the better reference of the two.
SOA Without Hype
CIO Magazine has a great read about SOA in which they pour some cold water over the SOA hype:
CIOs are chasing a distant dot on the horizon called agility (the ability to change IT quickly to fit business needs) and the dot is receding.
Fast.
I read articles before that pronounced “SOA is dead. Long live the next best thing!â€. This one takes a balanced approach. It talks about success stories, and cases where it doesn’t pay:
“Companies are creating a complex bureaucracy around something that 90 percent of the time is overkill,” says Thomas Gagné, CTO of InStream Financial, a software and financial services vendor. “Why are we replacing technology and obsolescing our employees’ skills faster than we’re realizing the benefits of the previous, now supposedly inadequate technologies?”
This article does a great job ignoring the fad, hype and buzz behind SOA and going straight for results. Does it make your company better or not?
Obviously, for some companies SOA is a great way to drive more business, for some it’s treading waters, and for others it’s a decent somewhat positive ROI. It’s not the silver bullet most (guess who?) would like you to think. But there’s definitely a lot to gain:
“I know for a fact that the same data is being extracted by at least 26 different applications in our environment for different purposes,” says Jeff Gleason, director of IT strategies for Transamerica Life Insurance, annuity products and services division. “We’re extracting it and paying to store it in all those different places. Just getting rid of those support costs is a big deal.”
The article asks seven questions you should ask yourself before deciding if and how much to invest. For the record, that comes before asking “how do I start?â€
And if SOA is right for you, there’s still a lot to learn on how best to apply those skills. Afterall, it’s not about technology. It’s about culture:
“A business sponsor says, ‘Well, if you’re going to make me pay for creating this service the first time, you just blew away the cost benefit of my project, and it’s not going to get sponsored. And so I want you to go ahead and hard-code the integration because I need that functionality.’ But then my job is to help them see how creating that service is not really a project artifact; it is a business architecture artifact.’â€
I quoted just enough to give you a taste, but I recommend you read it in full.
Hello SOA, Goodbye Agility
Agile companies use services. Reuse is a great way to reduce complexity, cut down costs and build more applications in less time. But services are also the result of an agile mentality. You break big problems into small solutions delivered incrementally. You isolate, iterate and let solutions evolve to solve the problem, and services will happen.
But SOA can also be the death of agility, as this article points out.
It starts with an inspiring story of initiative, self-help and making things happen. Our hero builds a service out of need. Soon other developers find out through word of mouth, learn how to use the service, and soon it becomes the backbone of the company’s e-commerce.
Those are all the ingredients of success. I should have stopped reading right there.
But in this particular story, agility is the enemy. And so we learn of the different ways in which you can solve the “agility problemâ€. How to setup beaurocracy through the right combination of barriers, red-tape and approval committees. It’s called SOA governance.
Of course, that’s to be expected. CIO magazine makes recommendations based on the business case. It talks to IT people to find out what works, when and how. IBM is in the business of selling software. Enough said.
I’m sure there’s a good side to SOA governance that actually works and delivers result. If you wrote or read such an article, can you point it out. I’d like to learn more.