<<There are wide views on what SOA is and its benefits. Many companies
have claimed success and many pundits point to a high volume of
failures. But if we cannot agree on what SOA is then how can we declare
success?
We can think of SOA as a set of valuable business services that have
positive ROI then in financial terms it should be considered a success.
We know that building services, from a technical perspective is very
easy (trivial really); building the right services is harder but not
rocket science so where are so many projects going wrong?
After working on many SOA projects and talking with companies and
architects all over the world I firmly believe that most SOA failures
are by far due to overspending or mistimed spending. If you don't spend
a lot of money it's hard to get the failure label slapped on your
efforts. If you build a few .NET web services and no one but you uses
them I don't think people will run around calling you a failure. But,
many companies have spent millions of dollars on SOA software,
infrastructure and consulting dollars with no idea how to justify the
costs. That's bound to get noticed.
They might have promised executive management reuse or agility or some
other intangible benefit to get the big bucks and then looking back over
a couple of years cannot qualify the benefits of the spend.
I said long ago
<http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/the-soa-blog/soa-roi-18635>, "Show me
actual projects with tangible benefits and ROI and prove how SOA will
benefit these projects. Intangible benefits, like agility, can and must
be quantified." Maturing SOA processes like governance should be a goal
but many have placed things like platform architecture and governance
ahead of the projects with tangible ROI.
As a good example, I recently talked to a company that spend millions of
dollars on SOA software and are now spending the next 18 months on their
architecture frameworks and governance model. I have to wonder, given
the time value of money, how that company will ever get to positive ROI.
Especially since no one is actually talking about business related
projects yet or even in the near future! All of this money was spent on
toys for architects.
But I have seen improvements in cost justification this year. With the
recession many companies are questioning every dollar spent. Everywhere
I go I am asked out to start SOA with low costs or with open source. I
tell people to start slow and spend little money early and improve
processes over time as benefits arrive to pay for them.
Find that great first project with a solid SOA entry point like
integration or process improvement and don't spend a ton of money early.
Once you start getting some project successes start investing more money
on tools and process. Then you will have a better idea on what you
really need based on real experiences and business driven project
requirements.
What do you think? Why have so many failed with SOA?>>
You can read this at:
http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/the-soa-blog/what-constitutes-a-soa-failure-30498
Gervas
