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For many organizations, SOA is a not a done deal. Even when there is a strong
technical commitment to move an organization's IT infrastructure in an SOA-direction,
there can remain many questions and challenges.
Of course there are the technical challenges - the actual process of creating,
deploying, and managing SOA-based solutions on an enterprise scale, over a long
period of time. Then there are questions about migrating, integrating or extending
existing applications and services into an SOA-environment. Another important
consideration for many organizations is the potential payoff from a move to
SOA and how confident a specific organization is in the benefits that SOA-based
environment will deliver. For example, will SOA really create a faster, more
flexible IT infrastructure that can enable an organization to respond to business
change more quickly?
But one of the biggest questions about SOA remains the one about money. How
can or should an organization fund SOA projects? Should (or even can) SOA be
funded on a project-by-project basis or should it be funded through some centralized
process? How can IT managers gain funding for a migration to SOA? It's a tough
question and one that many IT organizations are facing as they consider rolling
out SOA on an enterprise scale.
Although as with any new technology or approach there's bound to be questions
about the value of investment, I believe that one of the reasons we're seeing
these money questions play such an important role in SOA discussions and planning
is because of previous situations where software vendors (and/or consultants
or IT organizations) have over-promised and under-delivered. The challenge in
too many cases has been organizations' inability to turn initial promises and
potential for new technologies or from pilot projects into real value from enterprise-wide
deployments. From a funding perspective, SOA is reaping the results of previous
technology shortfalls.
It's not surprising that many SOA projects are running into challenges in these
areas, given the scope of SOA plans and the variable potential benefits-including
ones that can be difficult to estimate. For example, reuse is often cited as
a key potential benefit of SOA, but reuse generally only starts to pay significant
dividends when organizations reach a mature (and widespread) level of enterprise-scale
deployment. The problem is, in too many situations, an organization isn't going
to know whether the potential savings from reuse will really show up or not
until they actually get to the point where they've already committed significant
time, money and resources to SOA deployments.
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