It's clear SOA is showing many benefits to IT operations, improving developer productivity through reuse, and making it unnecessary to change 50 interfaces when a customer wants a change. But how much of an impact is SOA having on the business itself?
That's the question I sought to answer in a series of podcasts with industry experts, published as part of the recent InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum. In my first podcast chat (MP3 link here), I talked with Theo Beack, vice president of engineering and deputy CTO at BEA Systems, about what kind of business benefits are being seen as a result of SOA.
Theo explained that there are some instances where SOA helped stave off bankruptcy, and thrive through a renewed vigor in customer service. Adopting SOA to address customer satisfaction helped a California-based energy company better listen to its markets, Theo explains. "They were able to reduce infrastructure and cut support costs substantially. They were able to standardize their infrastructure to support this initiative, and accelerate their time to market with very creative solutions for the customer. In the past, their level of customer satisfaction was not very positive."
This is a case in which SOA is being adopted in support of new business initiatives -- such as attracting new customers or retaining existing ones. Customer service is just one area ripe for service-oriented systems.
How does a company know how much of a difference SOA is making? Theo also pointed out that ROI measurement can be elusive, however. However, this is a problem that had been around long before SOA came on the scene. "For IT organizations that have a very strong alignment with business, it's much easier to measure ROI. It's a struggle that is going through all over the world. It's not so much as a result of SOA -- organizations need to better align with IT and these IT initiatives with its portal, with its ERP system, with its SOA -- all of these initiatives really are being undertaken to support the business. And if there's a good alignment, it's much easier to measure the ROI."
Theo reports seeing many customers working within a BPM context. "I would say that a substantial percentage of our customers have either implemented BPM already or are doing it as part of the overall IT optimization strategy," he says. "Most of them find that, as a result of the SOA work, it's really possible for them to automate their processes." More and more customers are moving from applications-centric to process-centric solutions, better leveraging existing applications and increasing efficiency.
Event-driven architecture is another area of growing interest, Theo pointed out. EDA is still in its earlier days, but companies are starting to include EDA in their SOA strategies, particularly companies that have a real-time type of environment and mature SOA implementation. "EDA then becomes a natural extension of the existing work that they've done over the last three, four, five years," he explains.
Governance remains a key area of importance, and sometimes those challenges are related to more than just technology. "Every single organization where they've implemented governance, there is a different pattern and a different spin on how they successfully implement it," Theo says. "And that success is totally based on the dynamics of the culture of the respective organizations."
Theo cites three key challenges companies face in motivating employees to follow governance rules: low visibility, low adoption, and lack of automation. He suggests that, in order to overcome these respective challenges, companies set up a central repository to attract, capture, and analyze use of assets. "For SOA visibility, set up a central repository where you can attract the assets, capture them, see how they are being used and tied to that is the SOA implement is where management capabilities to monitor your fabric, to gain insight in what's been deployed, how they've been used, how they are performing."
Theo also recommends that companies balance positive and negative reinforcement in order to encourage project teams to comply with governance standards, such as by tying bonus incentives to compliance with governance standards
Listen to my entire interview with BEA's Theo Beack here. (MP3)
As part of this fall's SOA Executive Forum, InfoWorld, in cooperation with ebizQ, has published a special supplement on SOA: Building a Foundation for Continuous Change. The report features interviews with the industry's top practitioners to reveal the best practices, customer case studies and industry surveys that you can use to transform you tactical SOA systems into the right strategic mix of governance, and integration with complementary technologies like BPM that will increase the depths and directions of your business agility.
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