SOA in Action Blog

Taking a cue from Nicholas Carr's eye-opening Harvard Business Review article, "IT Doesn't Matter," Shawn Arney asks if SOA still "matters."

Carr argued that IT was reaching a point in ubiquity in which having IT was no more strategic than having utilities such as electricity and running water. You obviously can't function without it, but having it just keeps you on a level playing field with everyone else.

Could this argument be extended to service oriented architecture as well? Will having SOA practices merely be the norm, versus putting a company out front?

In a new article here at ebizQ, Shawn first picks apart Carr's original argument that IT itself is being reduced to commodity status. Basically, IT becomes a commodity when managers fail to recognize what can be done with it. As he observes:

"The professional CIO and CTO know by experience that IT does matter. However, I would guess it is likely true that many companies have fallen into the rut of IT management. If processes are working to a large extent, why rock the boat with innovation or change? We have bigger fish to fry and other priorities, such as keeping IT costs down and dealing efficiently with internal customer IT needs. Companies that treat IT as a cost center are demonstrating that they view IT as a commodity. They are in the same boat as the "IT Doesn't Matter" camp. There is little strategic differentiation going on here. On the other hand, companies that view IT as a strategic tool to leverage their differentiation will realize significant return on investment.

"The reality is that the strategic use of IT does matter. The proper use and investment in IT to reduce costs, streamline employee work, improve employee collaboration and automate processes is amazingly underutilized and underappreciated. Even with the many disparate IT software systems in place today, IT is still not fully taken advantage of."

Likewise, companies that recognize the transformative capabilities of SOA will see it as a differentiator for strategic competitive IT advantage. The two forms of leverage SOA brings is in developer efficiency and corporate agility.

First, in terms of efficiency, SOA allows "software developers to interact with a single software source for the company's business rules and data." This is significant, he says, because "the business rules and processes of a company are the hardest to pin down in terms of writing software. ...a single software source for these changes means that all the many different software systems that use these business rules will automatically reflect these changes as the rules are changed in this one place."

As a result, developers "need to worry about repeating the wheel in terms of business rules. The leverage from this approach is to free up programmer resources to work on higher level tasks." Plus, Shawn added, "this avoids the common issue of new programmers needing to figure out all the business rules before starting a new software project" -- often the toughest part of the process.

The advantages stemming from developer efficiency flow right into overall business competitive advantage, Shawn continued. "Business rules will be easier to implement, less costly to implement, and strategically more advantageous. The ideas and resources available for additional software built on top of existing business rules can lead strategically to higher level slicing-and-dicing of data, higher level and transparent views of the data and business processes... This can lead to strategic advantages by leveraging the knowledge you have inside your organization and making it available to sophisticated and customized views and processes built on top of this -- unlocking this knowledge." The result of breaking down these silos leads to "breakthrough efficiency."

Many companies are in the early stages of SOA, and are just starting to realize the benefits. Those companies that move forward aggressively with SOA, however, will stand apart from the rest.

Yes, IT matters. Yes, SOA matters.

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