If your primary business driver for your SOA initiative is "reducing cost", then reuse will be the primary goal. You won't see cost reduction unless you reuse the services. If that is your goal, then it's a good idea to focus on building data and infrastructure services rather than business process services. As Roy notes, data services (services that enable access to high-quality data) tend to be reused a lot more than other types of services.
If you have different business drivers for your SOA initiative, reuse might be less important. Agility is enabled through better separation of concerns. While Roy exaggerates a bit when talking about "swap and play", if you have effectively separated a capability into a service, it's typically easier to make changes to that service than to change a capability that's tightly integrated within a monolithic application. My concern with the messages conveyed in Roy's interview is that they are too technology focused. Reuse isn't a business goal. It's a technology goal that might enable reduced IT costs at some point down the road. Successful SOA initiatives define goals that deliver positive business outcomes: enable business units to capitalize on new business opportunities more quickly/faster time to market, reduce friction in business processes/improve employee efficiency/effectiveness, improve customer service/reduce customer attrition, improve corporate compliance position, etc. Lack of governance in SOA initiatives is a big issue, but it is not the reason that SOA initiatives fail. The primary issue impeding SOA success is an inability to engage the business in the initiative. Most initiatives are being driven by technical guys that can't articulate the value of SOA in business terms --i.e., in terms of business outcomes. Anne On Sat, Sep 27, 2008 at 12:37 PM, Rob Eamon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > --- In [email protected], Gervas > > Douglas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> Schulte: Probably the biggest disappointment is the low level of >> reuse or sharing that they're getting. I had one CIO from state >> government tell me, "We're getting less than 10 percent reuse." >> You know, the best we ever see is 40 percent reuse. We consider >> success anything between 10 and 40 percent. > > So many people on this forum and elsewhere have said reuse/sharing > isn't the primary goal. Why is the view that SOA is *about* reuse > still so prevalent? > >> business function cares about it. Some of these, like product data, >> customer data, employee data -- these are going to be reused a lot. > > Ack. There's that data focus again. > >> Yes, you will get that, but the more universal benefit from SOA is >> the modularity, the ability to swap out a module and replace it >> with a new version of it. > > IMO, that's a variation of reuse. And I've not seen a real swap out > of a meaningful component without some heavy lifting. The notion > of "swap and play" is more elusive than reuse/sharing, IME. > >> going to have interfaces among the components. And if you're not >> doing SOA, you're going to have informal, ad-hoc interfaces between >> the components. > > That seems to be a big assumption. Approaches other than SOA are > always informal and ad-hoc? Hmmm. > >> One of my colleagues does a presentation on SOA horror stories and >> most of them are organizational. You have several different groups >> doing SOA independently and they try to coordinate after the fact. >> You can do it, but it's really hard. You're trying to glue together >> things that weren't designed to work together, so you're into >> adapters and all sorts of gateways and stuff. By then you've done >> the services, so you've got customer information in five, 10, 15 >> different services. So it's very hard, where if you had done it up >> front, you'd be in better shape. > > In other words, most seem to focus on project-oriented approaches > rather take an enterprise view? They do lots of invidual application > or integration architectures and ignore the enterprise architecture? > > What are other peoples' experience here? Are you seeing lots of > piecemeal work as well? > > -Rob > >
