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<<Joe McKendrick
Panel:
Enterprises Too Busy Service-Orienting to be 'Disillusioned' by SOA
There's been plenty of chatter across the
blogosphere and among the
analysti about the growing "disillusionment" with service oriented
architecture. I'm sure you've seen the headlines -- SOA is "dead," SOA
adoption rates are down, SOA is not delivering ROI.
At an industry panel
discussion
hosted here at ebizQ, I took up the question of SOA disillusionment
with a panel of experts, and the consensus seems to point to issues
with management and perception, but organizations are showing no signs
in letting up on their SOA deployments. It's fair to say that while
plenty of SOA implementations often have not worked out as planned,
many enterprises are convinced that service orientation is the way to
go. (Link to online presentation here. Full
transcript here.)
Members of the panel included David Bressler of Progress Software; Dr.
Chris Harding of The Open Group; Chris
Kraus of ITKO LISA, Jignesh Shah of Software AG; and Phil Wainewright,
ebizQ's new cloud/SaaS guru and prolific ZDNet blogger.
Here are some excerpts of what turned out to be a most scintillating
discussion:
Opening
the discussion, I pondered whether we're asking more of IT than it can
deliver. IT is being called upon to sell the idea of transformation to
the business as a whole. I've always felt this was a quite a tall order
for IT departments, who are already overworked and overloaded with
keeping things running.
The 'newness' of SOA has worn off, and enterprises are rolling up
their sleeves and going to work on it. On
whether there is indeed 'disillusionment' with SOA: "At The Open Group,
I haven't yet heard anyone come up to me, or speak in the group and
say, 'Well, I'm disillusioned with SOA' -- I haven't heard that at
all," said Chris Harding. "What I have very definitely noticed is that
there's no longer an interest in 'learning' about SOA. People are no
longer seeing SOA as a great new thing... that they have to find out
about. But they're still interested in working on how you use SOA, how
you do SOA governance, how you integrate SOA into an architectural
framework -- they're still interested in looking at those things. But
what's disappeared is that SOA is a mystical new thing that we need to
find out about."
But, perhaps there has been overpromising with SOA: "Whether
its disillusionment or not its just a semantic thing, but I think it's
the kind of thing where vendors -- of which I am one -- go out and
promise the world to people, saying SOA is going to solve all of your
problems," said David Bressler. "So they brought in some stuff, they to
one extent or another implemented.. an SOA, or some sort of SOA
architecture, maybe they even modified some of the way they deliver IT
to the organization. They combined technology with process. Yet, they
still have the same problems they had before, and in some cases maybe
even more of them. Because now, instead of having a packaged
application where they can now go beat up a vendor, they now have ten
services, and they have to beat up ten vendors."
When proposing solutions to the business, don't call it 'SOA': "One
of things that I've seen working with customers that have been
successful with SOA is that when you're explaining, trying to sell SOA
to the business side, don't bother calling it SOA," said Jignesh Shah.
"It's not to say SOA is not relevant to the business side, but what's
more relevant is delivering services to the business.... This is not to
say SOA vision is not even necessary. It's not to say you should not
have a vision, strategy or a plan to go from A to B. But the way you
sell it to the business should remain in terms that are relevant to the
business."
Design services with reuse in mind: In
successful SOA efforts, services are designed for reuse across the
enterprise. "Quite honestly, it would be nice if we could say a service
is going
to be reusable next week," said Chris Kraus. "We're finding that our
customers who are most successful with SOA actually did some
architecture, and decided they're going to have a consistent view of a
customer object or an order object, and actually redesign the interface
to make sure it was reusable by multiple people. So the pilot wasn't to
create a Web service to serve ourselves. It has to be something that is
on purposely consumable by multiple people."
Work closely with the business on service iterations:
"The concept of SOA is not something that is alien to businesspeople,"
said Phil Wainewright. "Because at the end of the day business is all
about delivering services to contract, and SOA is all about IT
delivering services to contract. ...your need to move away from the
old waterfall approach to development, because pushing services out
there is a learning experience. You need to push them out into the
infrastructure and see if people are going to use them, and maybe you
need to fine tune those services before you get the right granularity
and the right set of features. ...SaaS providers have to iterate
through several versions of their APIs before they get their
integration story right going into the enterprise marketplace. Being
ready for change is ..part of the mindset adjustment to SOA.">>
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