The SOA ROI is difficult, if not impossible, to define and measure. Have you noticed that the press and the blogosphere are filled with SOA implementers and analysts discussing the ROI of SOA and the idea that stand-alone SOA efforts are dead? Why? Because SOA is a middleware technology and ROI is measured based on usage. Ultimately, these ROI discussions all seem to reach the same conclusion: 'Enterprise SOA ROI hinges on the ability to demonstrate value to the business at large — more growth, revenue opportunities, and all that good stuff.' said ebizQ's Joe McKendrick. And that’s the problem.

Let's face it, SOA is plumbing; buzz-worthy plumbing, but still plumbing. Your average business executive (think sales manager, marketing director, finance officer, or customer support rep) doesn’t understand SOA or, more importantly, grasp how it can help them with their day-to-day issues. In fact, if business folk think about it all, they probably just hope it stays out of sight and doesn’t get in the way of the IT projects that do address their needs.

SOA needs to shift from an IT-centric technology to a business accelerator solution. To paraphrase Macehiter/Ward-Dutton in their recent note, 'More big vs small thinking: SOA vs BPM', IT must focus on where the real business value of SOA lies. That means it needs help. Macehiter/Ward-Dutton point out that BPM can help distill some SOA value up to the business level. And as some of the Enterprise Ajax companies can attest, Rich Internet Application (RIA) tools like Silverlight, Flash/Flex, and Ajax also make good SOA service consumers. But a few RIA applications do not justify an enterprise-wide multi-year SOA effort. We need the business folks to talk about SOA like they do their CRM and ERP: as critical to their work.

Customer leads, purchase orders, inventory. These are the things business users understand. If SOA gets helps get this kind of data and functionality to them, faster and cheaper than they get it today, then you’ve got a winner. And this is where enterprise mashups enter the conversation: a middleware technology that actually involves the user. A mashup is a micro-integration of multiple Web-enabled sources. ‘Web-enabled sources’ is a fancy way of saying SOA and any service that adheres to standards and runs on the ubiquitous Web protocol: HTTP.