Reading this makes me wonder how many other efforts fall into the same
category? Lack of a business case or clear ROI is not a problem
specific to SOA. It is a problem for everything IT does. This is why
it is no surprise to me that Anne found a positive correlation between
solid application rationalization/portfolio management efforts with
SOA success. I suspect the same thing will be true with cloud
computing, at least for companies with existing infrastructure. For
startups, it is a different story since they don't have to answer the
"what are my current costs" question.
-tb
Todd Biske
http://www.biske.com/blog/
Sent from my iPhone
On May 21, 2009, at 7:24 AM, Gervas Douglas <[email protected]>
wrote:
Thanks to Anne for pointing out this article:
"A new Gartner survey of SOA architects finds 40 percent do not
measure how long it takes to achieve a ROI for their SOA -- or if
the darn thing had any business benefit, for that matter. Shame on
you guys! According to the survey:
Gartner, which carried out the survey among enterprises from around
the world, also highlighted the fact that 50 per cent of those who
had not yet adopted SOA technologies did so because they could not
articulate and demonstrate the business value of it.
[ Keep up on developments in SOA with InfoWorld's Technology:
Architecture newsletter. ]
The fact is that people love doing SOA, or SOA-like things, but hate
doing the business cases or, more importantly, the analysis that
needs to be done on the back end. There are no reasonable
expectations set going into the project, nor any measurement of
success on the back end. Thus, who knows if the SOA provided any
business value? Also, there are no clear objectives.
Massimo Pezzini, research vice president and fellow at Gartner, said
that many companies were approaching SOA projects with excessive
expectations and little awareness of the effort, resources and time
needed to achieve any benefits.
Some SOA projects are perceived to have failed when in fact there
are simply no well established metrics to evaluate success," he said.
Folks, you can't figure out if SOA is going to have any business
value without doing a business case up front. This means
understanding your core needs and how SOA will create an
architecture that solves actual problems, and not just looking to
push out an SOA because it seems like the right thing to do.
The metrics/analysis are pretty simple:
What are the current inefficiencies within the enterprise
architecture, and how much do you think that's costing the business?
What is the value of reuse, and how much reuse can you expect?
What is the value of agility?
What is the estimated cost of the project?
What are the estimated benefits from the dollars spent?
More importantly, how we define success -- or when we've achieved
the objectives of the project?
There's no excuse for leaving the ROI analysis out of this process.
You've been hearing that from me for years, so go run some numbers."
You can read this at:
http://www.infoworld.com/d/architecture/soa-roi-does-not-seem-be-priority-265
Gervas
