It is almost 9 months since I have blogged on ebizq. In 2008 I intend to make this my main blogging platform although I will continue to blog from time to time on the Lustratus blog as well. While I intend to change the focus of the blog from exclusively SOA related issues, I am restarting almost from where I left off 9 months ago. In particular, the hot topic was then and remains how to build a SOA business case. Joe’s SOA in Action blog returned to the topic quoting from David Linthicum

“SOA proponents need to redouble efforts to emphasize the business case, and de-emphasize the technology aspect, he said. "It all boils down to architecture." Still, he said, the reuse inherent in SOA can be made to work, and projects where CEOs can see demonstrable value -- such as a real-time analytics dashboard -- can achieve quick success.”

Meanwhile David’s ZapThink colleague, Jason Bloomberg told SearchSOA that

"Furthermore, enterprise mashups are becoming the killer use-case for SOA, that is, the ostensible reason for doing SOA from the perspective of the business. So, SOA is stronger than ever, it's just becoming part of the woodwork. Enterprise mashups are the part that shows."

I think that for better or worse these quotes reflect the reality. SOA is not an easy proposition to sell to business on its own – it is about what you use SOA to do. SOA is certainly a better way of doing internal application integration but these traditional application integration projects are not particularly interesting to the business sponsors. Lack of interest means that cost is everything and SOA can be a very hard sell as early projects have to bear the brunt of the SOA set-up costs (called the SOA tax by some). Therefore, SOA is more likely to flourish in areas where the additional initial overhead can be justified by greater returns and more importantly returns that are of greater interest to the business.

The concept of an enterprise mash-up has been attracting interest outside of the IT department. The concept is inherently attractive to business users as it suggests that there is a way to easily combine the information the business user cares about without apparent interference of IT departments with their long and expensive project cycles. Potential applications from CRM to executive dashboards quickly jump to mind.

Unfortunately, there remains no such thing as a free lunch. Enterprise mash-ups rely on the availability of reliable mechanisms to access the data and suitable access controls to ensure that only authorised users get to what could be very sensitive information. While it is possible to roll out pilot mash-ups, over time proliferation of mash-ups will have a much greater impact than the casual observer might expect: Each mash-up user touches potentially many systems and mash-ups often rely on directly polling the system at regular intervals. This means that large scale roll-out of mash-ups will put large and potentially unexpected pressure onto the applications and infrastructure if not carefully controlled.

Which brings us back to SOA: Large scale deployment of mash-ups will require enterprise grade integration infrastructure as provided by SOA. The challenge for IT departments will be to explain to the irate business user that the reason why their mash-ups don’t work so well any more is because they have to invest more in those vague and intangible concepts: middleware and architecture. We may arrive back to square one but at least our business colleagues may better understand why we need to be there!

Ronan

Posted by rbradley in Market Trends • Mash ups • SOA Predictions • Web2.0 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)