This post about SOA on the SystematicHR blog triggered a desire to write a couple observations that I haven’t yet had time to post. In the last part of 2007 and certainly as 2008 has begun, there definitely seems to be a shift to more healthy and measured assessments about Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). For example, the folks over at Zapthink have seemed to re-calibrate their message a bit from “Service Orient or Be Doomed!” to focusing on the message that companies need to develop or recruit the talent necessary to support SOA before they can expect success.
If you visited sites like Sys-Con SOA World during 2006-2007, you quite likely saw a pop-up or video ad that certainly would have suggested that the answer to your SOA implementation was in some network appliance or application. Again, I don’t see as many of the outlandish “SOA in a box” type pitches these days and companies like IBM also are emphasizing foundational issues such as “the SOA Skills Gap”. Having posted a couple times in the past about what I call the “50-50 divide,” I certainly have no trouble believing that skills scarcity is a factor holding back optimum SOA ROI.
Overall, it is a good thing that the SOA hype wave is subsiding and that implementers and solution providers are more focused than ever on real-world implementation issues. However, at a time when IT decisions are sometimes more influenced by what ZapThink analyst and InfoWorld blogger David Linthicum calls “management by magazine,” I do worry that there are some who won’t read beyond the sober headlines. The bottom line is that while the challenges of implementing a SOA are more recognized than ever before, what is really the alternative? There aren’t any IT analysts who are advising companies to “keep your applications monolithic” or “don’t worry about agility and adapting applications to change, let your customers adapt to your applications.” So while today’s assessments of SOA ROI are more realistic than what you might have heard a couple years ago, if you ratchet back the tone a bit, the above-referenced ZapThink book title isn’t that far off the mark. Perhaps the “truth-in-advertising” equivalent title might be “Service Orientation: Yes It Is Hard, But Doing Nothing or the Same Thing Isn’t Really an Alternative.” But then again, a publisher might not be so impressed.
See also this earlier post on SOA Finanical Justification at last year’s Partnering & Integration Summit. Be sure to mark your calendar to attend the 2008 Summit, Oct. 13-14.