A couple of months back at this blogsite, we discussed the SOA centers of excellence. One of the big advantages of these centers -- also known as integration competency centers or steering committees -- is that they can lift SOA projects above the fray of organizational politics. A new report in ComputerWeekly talks about another advantage to these centers: they can cut costs as well.
While SOAs can save organizations money in the long run, they are often more expensive to start up. One of the challenges for SOA proponents, in fact, is selling the business on spending an elevated amount of money initially, with the promise of economies of scale as services or interfaces get reused. The author, Cath Jennings, cites Gartner estimates that SOA centers can save up to 30% in time and expenditure on application integration and data interface development, and cut maintenance outlay by 20%. It can also help them to ensure component reuse levels of about 25%.
How do these savings come about? Neil Macehiter, partner at Macehiter Ward-Dutton, says SOA centers introduce a common, consistent, best-practice approach across all domains. "As the scale of the organization and its ambitions grow, the benefit of a center is that it can provide centralized guidance in terms of architecture and technical standards, which helps reduce cost and increase value and quality," he says.
The importance of achieving a single approach to SOA was borne out in a recent ebizQ survey of 244 companies, which confirmed that in most cases, SOA is not one effort that an enterprise launches, but a series of initiatives that arise to address different challenges within different business units. At least half of the companies surveyed reported having up to 10 separate SOA efforts going on under a single roof. There's no such thing as a single, all-encompassing SOA effort that covers every service initiative from every corner of the enterprise.
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