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Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has a lot to live up to. IT industry vendors, analysts and other commentators have variously positioned it as everything from a silver bullet to solve the World's systems integration problems, to a way of achieving the ultimate level of alignment between IT and the business. If you listen to the advocacy camp, you could easily get the impression that SOA is already woven into the thinking of the mainstream IT professional community.
A recent Freeform Dynamics study, however, suggests that those with this view might be getting a little ahead of themselves. While knowledge of SOA is certainly building to significant levels, it is still somewhat limited with just over a third of IT professionals across Western Europe and North America having a good working knowledge of SOA or better.
The other impression we often get from advocacy groups is that SOA represents a radical new way of doing things. This is something we explored explicitly in the Freeform Dynamics study, and we found that less than 5% of those we spoke with agreed with this view. The general opinion is that the best way to think about SOA is as an evolution of ideas and practices that have been around for a while - component based development, distributed encapsulated services, mapping of IT services onto business processes, and so on. The thing that's changed is that everything has been pulled together into a coherent set of principles that are now enabled by open standards and the right kind of tooling and middleware, all of which have been challenges in the past.
Turning to the rationale for SOA, the research confirms the approach can boost the level of software reuse and streamline both the development and the maintenance process, which in turn translates to increased efficiency and cost savings. When we home in on experienced adopters, however, much more emphasis is put on the ability of SOA to allow a more rapid and flexible response to changing requirements and new demands hitting IT from the business. The suggestion here is that the drivers for SOA adoption have more to do with value creation and alignment of IT with business process than with cost saving.
Experienced adopters also highlight another major benefit associated with how effectively IT communicates with the business. As "service speak" is a language much more familiar to business people than "IT speak", the adoption of SOA can ease the dialogue between the two camps, even allowing the relationship to move from the reactive request/response mindset to more of a proactive collaborative approach. Many respondents provided anecdotal feedback to illustrate this.
But there are some significant challenges with SOA. Other feedback from the research suggests that implementation needs to be approached in the right kind of way, otherwise SOA initiatives are likely to flounder and fail to deliver results. There is nothing wrong getting your feet wet with a single discrete manageable project, in fact this is recommended, but it's a big mistake to start out with a purely tactical approach without thinking about where it is leading. This is because the benefits of SOA are cumulative, so the real payback tends to kick in several projects down the line in a coordinated initiative.
Related to this, experienced adopters underline the importance of senior management buy-in to make sure that support and investment are forthcoming on a sustained basis, particularly in the early days when the groundwork is being done. This, however, brings another challenge into sharp focus, that of actually explaining what SOA is and the rationale for it to business executives.
Fortunately, we received lots of tips from respondents on how to deal with this issue such as the following:
"Explain it like fast food delivery. There may be fifteen people in the back making different kinds of food, but all you need to know about is how to talk to the person at the cash register".
"Explaining it as a pick-and-mix concept (while ignoring middleware) seems to get the basic idea over. Then provide a set of 'if this changes' or 'what if' situations to justify middleware".
"Don't even attempt to articulate IT concepts as being business friendly. Start with business concepts and explain how these drive or are enabled / simplified through the adoption of SOA".
"Discuss SOA in the context of existing company issues/concerns/deficiencies (include financial, time, quality, inefficiencies) to back up the justification to adopt. Pick an initial problem area to illustrate how SOA could help - reinforcing the need".
"Make a firm map of current implementations, especially overlap of functionality. Be sure to highlight build and deployment issues that cost a great deal of money, and the turnaround time for IT (lack of agility) with current tightly-coupled systems".
But it's not just business execs that are unclear on SOA. It is evident from the research that one of the biggest challenges standing in the way of organisations taking advantage of SOA at the moment is a more general degree of uncertainty about what exactly SOA is. Less than a quarter of those participating in the study, for example, said the definition of SOA was completely clear to them.
It is arguable that some IT vendors haven't particularly helped here with their narrow definitions of SOA picking up on just those aspects that are relevant to their offerings. Natural though this is, it has led to IT professionals being hit with a range of stories that often don't gel very well and sometimes even directly conflict with each other. And it doesn't help when vendors and analysts come up with ludicrous hype laden terms like "SOA 2.0" - as if there wasn't enough confusion out there already.
The bottom line, however, is that SOA really does appear to be delivering results in some organisations, so as one of our respondents put it, it's all about "keeping the faith and avoiding the buzzword soup".
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