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The gap has been clear for a while between the SOA aspiration of “aligning technology with business” and the reality that surveys and personal experiences reflect: SOA is proving remarkably difficult to justify to the business community. You can talk about reuse and agility but unfortunately they are terms that either cause the eyes to glaze over entirely, sound like attempt to justify investment in the intangible (again!) or require long and complex explanations. However, the issue is probably more about terminology than anything else and the key may be to stop talking service reuse and start talking about service sharing.

A few weeks back I was part of the ebizq podcast on reuse:

During this podcast, this issue was tangentially addressed when both I and Neil Ward-Dutton agreed that there was a problem with the word reuse itself: Reuse was being assumed by some to mean precisely the same as reuse means in OO. This is both inaccurate and brings with it a whole load of baggage around the perceived failure of OO to deliver business benefit. In the SOA context, most if not all reuse is actually about the sharing of services between multiple projects. Sharing is a much better description of what actually happens in SOA: Reuse suggests taking a copy and using it elsewhere, whereas sharing suggests multiple simultaneous use of a single resource. i.e. Precisely what Service Orientation is about.

However while the concept of shared services is well established as a ‘good thing’ from a business perspective, many organizations have found that it has proven hard to implement from an IT point of view in a cost effective and flexible way. And the degree of acceptance of the shared service model can be seen in the Economist Intelligence units report on the public sector and commented on by Joe McKendrick recently:

“at least 70 percent of public sector agencies are using or intend to use a "shared-services model" to enhance citizen service and increase efficiency”

Therefore explaining that SOA enables the implementation of the business concept of shared services at a much lower cost is both comprehendible and addresses a well-known problem. Moreover, SOA allows any organization to take shared services much further – identifying all sorts of internal resources which can be effectively shared as services and hence unlock further cost saving and business flexibility.

All of this may be obvious to many, but often the message is getting lost in the terminology. Perhaps it is time to create a new slogan for SOA: “SOA enables shared services”.

Posted by rbradley in Government • SOA concepts |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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