SOA's Success Will be Uneven

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October 18, 2006

SOA's Success Will be Uneven

Why do some organizations seem to excel at SOA, even in the earliest stages, while others have a hard time struggling with it? Ken Vollmer, analyst with Forrester Research and a keynoter for ebizQ's upcoming SOA in Action virtual conference, has some observations on the common threads SOA winners share. I caught up to Vollmer the other week, and he shared some insights on what it takes to make SOA succeed.

First of all, Vollmer makes it clear that the potential benefits from service-oriented architecture are too big to ignore.

For example, he explains, "I can think of two financial institutions that were able to achieve a 60 percent reduction in time required to develop new application functionality. I don’t know of too many CIOs that shouldn’t be very interested in that, because it’s a huge savings in costs. If they’re really under pressure to do things with less, they should be looking at service-oriented architecture."

At the root of such success, he says, is a factor that separates out forward-looking enterprises from more stagnate organizations: corporate culture. "There are some organizations that are flexible and forward-looking that are able to bring this technology in, work with it, experiment with it, get it working, and then actually start generating some significant improvements," Vollmer points out. "Some organizations are just better at SOA than others. Will the advantages of SOA be the same across the board? Absolutely not. Because there’s too many other factors that can impact the final result."

Nevertheless, shifting to an SOA way of thinking can result in positive changes. "One bank CIO told me that his development group had been thoroughly indoctrinated in a new model-driven way of doing things, and has been able to totally wipe out his application backlog," Vollmer said.

If you are one of the unfortunate many who are mired in more hidebound, or even moribund, corporate cultures, don't give up hope, Vollmer adds. Start a small, incremental SOA effort, and show results -- such as finishing projects in less than half the time normally expected -- at a fraction of the cost, of course. The businesspeople will start lining up outside your door, and success will breed success.

But again, every organization will see its own variation on the SOA success theme, Vollmer says. "There are huge differences in how organizations function. Every culture is different." But the change is inevitable, as enterprises that are ahead of the SOA curve gain efficiencies over their competitors. Just as new manufacturing techniques kept winners ahead of the pack for decades, new technology processes -- such as SOA -- will be felt in the market. "We don’t want to keep manufacturing things the way we did in the past; we would never get anywhere."

Ken Vollmer's keynote at the upcoming SOA in Action conference will be on Thursday, November 16th, from 10:00 to 11:30 am ET. For more details, click here.

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