I differentiate "SOA project" from "SOA initiative". A project refers to the development of a specific set of services to address the needs of a single application or integration project. The initiative refers to the strategic effort to rearchitect the application portfolio to achieve a set of broad business goals, e.g., increase agility, reduce IT budgets, improve data quality, optimize business processes, etc.
All but one of the companies we interviewed had deployed successful SOA projects, i.e., the project met its objectives to deliver a working solution. In many circumstances, the services were used for one application, and it's very unlikely that they would ever be reused. I refer to these as "one-off services". I did find a few examples of projects that delivered reusable services. One of my favorite stories comes from a large investment bank. They have three very successful shared services -- all are data services. One accesses HR information. One accesses reference data. The third provides access to data from the mainframe. They also have tons of applications that use one-off services. But the SOA initiative at this company has completely stalled.The EA team responsible for SOA has gone on to other things. For the most part, I let the interviewees tell me whether their initiatives were "successful" or not. We started our interviews by asking how the initiative was going. Our approach was to ask open-ended questions and just let them talk. Most of our interviewees responding by recounting how much trouble they were having getting the business folks to get engaged. They had pretty much taken the initiative as far as they could from a technical perspective. Many had built a beautiful infrastructure, but no one would use it. It was remarkably clear that the biggest challenge facing SOA initiative teams is adoption. Only a few companies talked to me about how much strategic progress they'd made. As I said in the presentation, the success stories were very inspiring. And they all involved an investment in social capital. One thing I found really surprising was that the people from the successful initiatives rarely talked about their infrastructure. I had to explicitly solicit the information from them. From their perspective, the technology was the least important aspect of their initiative. Typically, they built their services using existing application platforms -- they didn't bring in an ESB. I think all of them were using some type of management technology (e.g., Amberpoint or Actional). They rarely talked about design-time governance -- other than improving their SDLC processes. They implemented governance via better processes. Most of it was human-driven, although many use repositories to manage artifacts and coordinate lifecycle. But again, the governance effort was less important than the investment in social capital. I'm still committed to my assertion that governance is critical to a successful SOA initiative--but only because governance is a means to effect behavioral change. The true success factor is changing behavior. Anne On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 6:17 AM, htshozawa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Interesting article. > Just curious Anne, who decided is the project was a success or a > failure and what was the timeframe when the deciding data was measured? > Was it immediately after the project finished or was it may be a year > after? > > I'm just wondering because most people involved in the project will > rate it as a success. :) > > H.Ozawa > > --- In [email protected], "Gervas > > Douglas" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >> According to Burton Group vice president and research director Anne >> Thomas Manes, some users had executed nearly perfectly in terms of >> doing SOA on the IT side, but the initiative had yielded no increased >> agility, quicker time to market or project savings because the >> business remained completely oblivious to the initiative. Yet the >> study also found that users who do break down artificial corporate >> barriers, install proper governance and involve the business have >> runaway success stories to tell. >> > >
