We’ve just wrapped up the SOA in Action event, and all sessions will be available for archived viewing.
I was pleased to have served as emcee and moderator of the conference, which is intended to help set the tone for the course of service-oriented architecture in the years ahead. We had a lot of the industry’s leading thinkers — as well as practitioners — provide their insights on the lay of the SOA land. Also, big-time kudos to the ebizQ and Unisfair folks who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to make it all happen.
I’ll be exploring the content presented in the sessions in depth over the coming weeks. There’s lots to share!
Now, a few words about our mission. I’ll quote the same things I told Loraine Lawson in her marvelous integration column about the intent of the conference, and the new expanding role of SOA.
What do we mean by “Phase 2″ of SOA?
Phase Two is where SOA has moved out of the IT shops and is becoming
part and practice with the business. We’ve just about gone as far as we
can with working with standards and solutions, and it’s time SOA began
demonstrating what it can do for the business. And, I believe, it is
working for the business. Gartner even says SOA is past the “Trough of
Disillusionment” and is gradually rising up the “Slope of
Enlightenment” to the “Plateau of Productivity.” That means we’ve gotten past all the hype and
blow-out-of-proportion promises, and managers and professionals are
rolling up their sleeves and figuring out how it can be applied to
solving business problems.
- IBM’s Tina Groves provides some outstanding examples of SOA case studies in her presentation, “Smart Work in Government and Beyond.”
- Government is an example of an area seeing a lot of interesting and successful SOA-based implementations. Check out “SOA in Government: Changing the Game for Government IT“, moderated by Dave Chesebrough, president of AFEI, and joined by the CIO of the US Department of Defense, Dan
Risacher, as well as the Navy’s Matthew Schwartz.
- Cloud is a key area of the future of SOA. Dave Linthicum led an industry roundtable on “The Convergence of Cloud Computing and SOA,”
joined by Mike Kavis, a noted SOA and
Enterprise Architecture consultant, and Ed Horst, vice president of
product strategy at AmberPoint.
Where is SOA these days as a business initiative?
SOA is reaching the point where it’s becoming part of everything we
do — writing applications, installing packaged applications, and
integration work. It’s almost becoming a given that there is going to
be service-orientation built into our systems. And we’re seeing that
thinking moving forward into newer approaches such as cloud computing
and Enterprise Web 2.0. After all, isn’t cloud computing about the
delivery of services?
I
have a continuum, a maturity model if you will, that looks at SOA in
terms of five stages. The first stage is basically under-the-radar
stuff, various folks in the organization piloting or fiddling around
with various IT and business services for one-off purposes.
The
second is JBOWS, or Just a Bunch of Web Services, in which the light
has gone on, and managers are saying, “Yes, we need SOA, and we have
SOA going on now because we have 100 Web services.” Of course, many
organizations that think they have SOA still have JBOWS because they
don’t have the proper governance or orchestration of the services.
They’re simply a lot of point-to-point implementations.
The
next phase is GBOWS, or Governed Web Services, followed by what I’d
call “SOA Lite,” meaning they have functioning SOA for certain business
processes. The final stage is SOA Nirvana, which, like pure democracy,
is more an ideal than reality.
At this time, most organizations are still in the JBOWS stage of the scale. But that’s OK, because SOA is an evolution.
What about the ROI of SOA?
The companies that are seeing ROI are those that are doing a good
job of measuring their progress. You don’t have to have precise
metrics, but it’s a good idea to establish a baseline on what
applications or projects are costing before an SOA initiative is under
way, then go back and measure it six months, a year later to see what
the difference has been. The key is to measure what you’re doing, so
you can show management the difference an SOA approach has made.
Having
said that, it’s important to note that there’s two stages of ROI that
we’ll be seeing. Early on, the ROI will come from easier wins, such as
common interfaces or reusable services increasing developer
productivity. Maybe it only took a month to automate a new process
because the necessary services were already available and tested in the
enterprise, versus a year of development time. That can be measured and
documented. However, when we start talking about “business agility,”
where do you begin to measure that? Increased profits, more customers?
How exactly did SOA bring that? That’s the long-term challenge of SOA
ROI, and I’m not sure if companies have a handle on that yet.
- For a very imformative ROI discussion, check out the industry roundtable, “SOA Value is Unreachable Without Governance,”
in which WebLayers’ John Favazza and Software AG’s Miko Matsumura talk about the best ways to see returns on SOA investments.