"Nobody was ever fired for implementing an SOA."
Unfortunately, such a phrase does not hold true -- at least not yet. You may remember the phrase "Nobody ever was fired for choosing IBM," which held sway in the 1980s. While SOA has a huge potential upside in lowered development costs and more agility, there is plenty of risk in moving an SOA agenda forward.
In a new article in Java Development Journal, Dave Linthicum has identified this as the SOA proponents' conundrum. "While adding applications, directories, and databases to an existing architecture is easy and risk-adverse, changing architectures around systemic notions such as SOA is hard and comes with risk," he said. "Thus, many are choosing to ignore it. In many instances it's the culture, with some organizations promoting a 'you fail and you're fired' approach versus a 'let's try new things and seek improvement.'"
Before you embark on an organization-transforming endeavor to move SOA forward, Dave poses six questions, which should be answered in the affirmative:
1. Has someone compared the current architecture with best practices in your industry to spot issues that need correction, such as the architecture's inability to align and keep up with the business?
2. Has someone done an ROI analysis of the value of SOA, or other approaches for that matter, for the current architecture and reported it to management?
3. Do you have a complete service-, semantic-, and process-level understanding of your enterprise?
4. Do you have a common abstract model for key elements, such as customers, sales, inventory, transactions, etc.?
5. Are systems well integrated and do they communicate in real-time when needed?
6. Can you change your architecture to accommodate business changes at the speed required by management and the marketplace?
Leave a comment