The following is a transcript of a recent podcast interview of Randy Heffner, VP and analyst with Forrester Research, with Joe McKendrick, contributing analyst with ebizQ.
Listen to or download the 11:54 podcast below:
Joe McKendrick: Hello, this is Joe McKendrick, contributing analyst for ebizQ and I'm here today with Rand Heffner, analyst with Forrester Research. Randy, really pleased to have you join us.
Randy Heffner: Yeah, it's fun to be here. Thanks Joe.
JOE: Randy will be our keynote speaker at the upcoming SOA in Action conference scheduled for October 28th and 29th. Randy's presentation will the morning of October 28th and it'll be a virtual conference, so you can tune in from your computers. Randy has been doing a lot of work in the area of SOA, looking at SOA adoption patterns and trends, and I know he's going to be providing us with a lot of great insights on the state of SOA adoption.
Now Randy, one thing -- a few months back, I had the opportunity to listen to one of your colleagues, John Reimer, talk about a recent study that Forrester conducted, last spring, on the State of SOA Adoption. And it's funny, in the presentation he had this slide. I'll explain the context. Anne Thomas Manes, in her "SOA is Dead" blog post back in early 2009, has this picture of a dinosaur -- you could call it a stegosaurus or a SOA stegosaurus. The dinosaur represented SOA, and there's a comet or an asteroid coming it, and the asteroid was labeled "the economy." Anne's point was that the economy was going to be wiping out SOA as we know it.
Now John took that slide and labeled the dinosaur as "IT Inefficiencies," and labeled the incoming asteroid as "SOA." In other words, SOA is delivering a tremendous amount of efficiency. I thought that was a funny and relevant point he was making. Randy, can you talk a little bit about the study that --
RANDY: Yeah, yeah, I hadn't even seen John use that illustration but no, that's exactly the thinking about why I named the report "SOA is Far From Dead, But It Should Be Buried." We'll talk a little bit more about the "But It Should Be Buried" part in a bit.
JOE: Okay.
RANDY: I mean the data just shows that SOA is very much alive and well and very much adding value, not perfectly in the sense that they're still folks that struggle because SOA is not an easy thing. But I think a lot of the struggling with SOA comes from what I'll spend a lot of time at the SOA in Action Conference talking about and that is some of the misguided ways that people view SOA.
And, you know, when they view it as a technology as sort of the next thing in line after objects, and components, and all about reuse and just about connecting between applications on the wire. I mean these are all very small ways to view SOA. What's much more important is to view it from a design perspective, but just quickly some of the numbers. By the end of this year, 75% of the global 2000, that's folks with 20,000 or more employees, say that they'll be using SOA. And of those that are using it now, most -- the majority of them have an enterprise level commitment to SOA.
When we ask are you satisfied? Roughly, about 25% says that SOA has provided most or all of the benefits that they expected. There's another 30 to 40%, depending upon the size of the company look at that says that, well, it's provided less than we expected but still enough benefit that we're expanding our use of SOA. There's a group of folks that struggle, but most importantly, there's only about 1% of SOA users who say, it's provided little or no benefit and we're cutting back. So a lot of that figuring out the struggles is where the industry needs to be.
JOE: Wow, that's really interesting that only 1% have had a real negative experience with SOA. We're constantly hearing or being bombarded with opinions that SOA has not lived up to its hype or its expectations and companies aren't getting it right. One percent is low for any type of technology initiative.
RANDY: And understand that there will be more talk in the industry that is, well, let's call it negative or the struggling talk. That 1% is those who said forget it basically, we're cutting back, we've come to the conclusion that it was just all about hype. This is --
JOE: They just threw it under the bus.
RANDY: Yeah, right.
JOE: Enterprise service bus. Pun intended.
RANDY: Yeah, there you go, exactly, threw the enterprise service bus off the cliff. They're about 20% out there that say we're struggling enough that we're not going to expand until we sort it out and there's about 20% or so that say it's too early to tell. But I mean there's a majority that says we're expanding SOA (Inaudible) provide enough benefits, its important. And those folks are making some important progress. There's about 6% or so of SOA users that say they're doing more than 50% of their solution delivery projects using SOA. So this is not just a game that people are playing, this is real commitment, real work being done out there with SOA.
JOE: Randy among that 25% that really are seeing a lot of benefits coming out of SOA, what distinguishes them from the rest of the group? What are they doing differently?
RANDY: I think some of the important things that got out of there is they're treating SOA as a business design concept and there's one SOA user who so much wanted to treat as a business design concept. They didn't want to us the architecture because that was too technology oriented and so they call it Service Oriented Approach to their processes and the way they build solutions. That sets a whole different perspective on how you view the kinds of services that you're building, the methods that you put around it.
So another important practice that we see, we see emerging more and more but there's little talked about in the industry is service portfolio management. So here's one of the things I'll talk about at the conference is a lot of folks coming from the SOA is all that we use objects, components, etc. point of view who say that, well, it's all about a service library, just let projects create what services they need to, and drop them in a library, and then people can search, discover something that's there that they might be able to use. Well, that's a very haphazard kind of way to go about your business.
I mean when you view it this SOA, the services are creating our business services, our business capabilities. Well, you know what business you're in. You should be creating a coherent portfolio of business capabilities that are embodied in your SOA services and hence service portfolio management is a much stronger approach to building a collection of services than is a service library approach. That's one example.
There's other things but one other one that I'll highlight is very often there's sort of the, whew boy, if we're going to get into SOA, it's really going to take a lot kind of thing. Yeah, we can't take a small step into this we got to take a big huge step in it. And that's just flat wrong. You know I talk to customers that were starting into SOA and they weren't buying anything new. They're starting into it one project to pilot, and learn, and grow from there. In other words, it's all about incremental evolution. If I can put it this way, evolution toward an intelligent design for their systems. It's an important difference. A lot of these things flow out of just viewing SOA a business design thing.
JOE: When you talk about service portfolio management, is that the same thing as governance or we talking about something a little bit different than governance?
RANDY: It's just a -- yeah, it's a piece of governance. A very important piece of governance. In fact, one of the ones that I'll name as the top three most important things to be doing for SOA. And for Forrester clients, by the way, there's -- I've just got some reports that'll be coming out over the next couple of weeks in terms of -- that are providing some numbers about -- from real SOA governance practices and what's providing value and what's not for SOA governance in general, for SOA centers of excellence, but it's just a piece. We name about ten major areas of SOA governance and service portfolio management is just one of them.
JOE: Do you find governance -- is there a chicken or egg kind of quandary there where you need governance -- I heard it said that you need governance as you start up your SOA but others would say, well, when you're starting up SOA, you're deploying some services and it's really not time to put a governance infracture of top of that.
RANDY: Yeah, yeah, I mean you get around to the key part of it when you insert the word "infrastructure" at the end and have governance from the start. Yes, there's -- very important to be thinking about governance from the start to be thinking about things like portfolio management, about how you're going to make sure that the services that are actually designed and built are the right services and that they're designed well. And I'm focusing and making that (Inaudible). I'm focusing very narrowly on the design of the interfaces of your services, which are really the fulcrum of the architecture.
Well, if you get those right, lots of stuff goes well with SOA. If you get them wrong, then you set yourself up for a lot of challenges so you need to make sure that you've got good governance around design practices. That doesn't mean that you got to go out and spend half a million dollars on SOA service life cycle management, SOA repository, enterprise service bus or anything else. In fact, for the governance oriented aspects of SOA infrastructure, the best practice that we see in the industry really is work out your processes first and then go figure out what infracture is going to help you best implement those processes because you'll be a lot smarter about choosing a product and deciding who detailed the functionality that you need in a product and how you'll actually the product.
And here's what the core inside behind this is, is that people come at it and say, we need to buy some product to solve our reuse problem. Never mind focusing too much on reuse versus the overall business design thing but that's the sort of thing that -- the attitude they have sometimes. Well, it's not the technology that solves your reuse problem because reuse problem is not a technology problem; it's an organizational discipline and maturity in governance problem. So throwing technology at it is just going to throw money at it, but what you need to be doing is figuring out your process. And so we see people running a governance process quite happily initially at least on a spreadsheet or webpage, or something like that until they work out their processes and then it's time to go because then you really know what you want to buy.
JOE: So it doesn't matter as long as you get the governance underway.
RANDY: Yeah, get the governance underway.
JOE: (Inaudible), right.
RANDY: Yeah, the organizational structures working, understand what you need, start small. I mean if you're trying to get a big organization moving very quickly then the same thought process applies but you have to be a lot more careful in your risk management as you accelerate the rollout of that but the same concepts apply.
JOE: Okay. Great. Randy, I appreciate being able to share your insights. And again, Randy Heffner will be our keynote speaker at the SOA in Action Conference coming up here at ebizQ, ebizQ.net on October 28th and we hope everybody will be able to join us there. We have a great conference lined up for you. A lot of great panels, discussions on SOA and government, SOA in the cloud. We're going to be talking about the intersection with cloud computing. And of course, the theme will be SOA Means Business. As Randy has just been discussing with us, it's essential that SOA become part of the business and vice versa. Randy, thank you very much for joining us today and we look forward to seeing you at the virtual conference.
RANDY: Thanks great. Thanks a lot Joe; it'll be fun.
Randy Heffner will be keynoting SOA in Action, an informative two-day event (October 28-29), featuring leading experts and practitioners (not to mention yours truly!) discuss strategies and best practices for promoting and deploying SOA throughout the enterprise. Join us for an agenda packed full of sessions and panel discussions on the latest thinking in SOA.
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