<<Joe McKendrick's summary at the end of August of opinions about
whether reuse is achievable with SOA or even if it is the real benefit
of SOA seems to have ignited an increasingly widespread debate. Reuse
is now being discussed in CIO blogs such as here , slammed by Miko
Matsumura in "Die SOA Reuse Die", and defended in my own Illuminatus
Research blog among other places, with Joe stirring the fires again at
his own blog .
So why the big debate? First off, it is not surprising that at this
stage in the SOA adoption curve, failures (or at least lack of
success) will be trumpeted more loudly than success. However, there
have been successes with SOA reuse for instance at Wachovia as I
previously commented on.
Even if we accept these set-backs, I do not believe that we should
simply abandon reuse as a goal frankly without reuse, aren't we
giving up on the benefit of SOA which is most tangible? And while it
is tempting to move away from the tangible and adopt the higher level
abstract goals of "business agility" or "better infrastructure", they
are hard to measure without being tied back to reuse and hence hard to
justify a business case with. As my Illuminatus Research colleague,
Steve Craggs puts it:
"a lot of these are grand, strategic benefits can be somewhat
difficult to measure, and this is a problem to those people trying to
build business cases to justify SOA investment. I think this brings us
back to reuse as being a major pragmatic driver of SOA - that is, a
driver that actually drives real SOA investment."
Which brings me to my own three step solution for driving up reuse
levels (yes it is high level and simplified but anyway):
1. Get the technology right make sure your service definitions are
designed with reuse in mind (Gary So of Webmethods has recently
covered this subject . Get the technology back-up in place to ensure
that services are easy to reuse from registries to repositories to
governance to wikis.
2. Get the organization right SOA isn't just about technology and in
particular it is clear that relying on the technology alone won't
deliver reuse. Some commentators seem to throw the towel in and say
that conservative organizations won't be able to make the change, I am
not sure so. The primary change I would recommend is to identify
clearly service owners. This was the approach taken in Wachovia and
other places that have had SOA reuse success. It is also an approach
which is inline with even conservative management theory: clear
responsibility, clear measurement.
3. Pay up: Incent with bonuses both the service owner and the service
consumers to meet reuse targets. If you incent both ends of the
transaction, things start to happen. Yes, there are risks of abuse
that must be policed against but the rewards are greater than those
risks. I have written a free-to-download piece on this and the second
step on at the new Illuminatus Research site
http://www.illuminatusresearch.com/.
Unfortunately, as technologists we are comfortable with item 1,
willing to discuss item 2 primarily in the context of the IT
department (SOA competency centres and service librarians are good
ideas, simply not sufficient) and seem shy to address 3 at all!>>
You can find this at:
<http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/soaroads/2006/10/a_three_step_solution_to_incre.php>
Gervas
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