Moe's SOA & BPM Blog
My informed ramblings on making SOA & BPM work for you.
Some of these come from my infamous but now defunct Alphacourt blog.
Wednesday 29 October 2008, 3:05 PM
Avoiding the SOA Dead End
I'm sure many of you are either contemplating joining or actually sitting on the SOA bandwagon with high hopes of delivering the business benefit that we as IT professionals promise to our lords and (pay)masters on a regular basis. In case some of you are unsure of the true benefits or how to quantify them for budgetary purposes, here are some 'home truths' gleaned from real activity out in the wild.
SOA can save money. But not in the beginning. One of the key benefits promised for SOA is re-use of the assets and services developed. One obvious consequence of this is that re-use is a benefit gained from the SECOND project onwards, but not the first. The business case for SOA requires a more holistic approach to benefits realisation over a longer period, e.g. reducing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for the key processes delivered using SOA.
You can't buy SOA. SOA is not a product; it is a set of architectural concepts to develop a framework, a set of standards and (hopefully) a governance model. You may buy specific tools and services that are SOA-enabled, but this should only be when you already have the Architecture understood and agreed.
Web Services are not SOA. Most of the hype around SOA has been geared towards the development of XML and SOAP messages using HTTP. Web Services can be used as part of the delivery of rich business services with a Service Oriented Architecture, but SOA can exist and deliver benefit quite happily without Web Services. Many companies have managed to use Web Services to create another island of development standards that are not part of any enterprise architecture - typically increasing the chaos within IT delivery rather than improving the quality.
We will be publishing more war stories and examples of good and bad practice in future blogs.
John Moe
SOA can save money. But not in the beginning. One of the key benefits promised for SOA is re-use of the assets and services developed. One obvious consequence of this is that re-use is a benefit gained from the SECOND project onwards, but not the first. The business case for SOA requires a more holistic approach to benefits realisation over a longer period, e.g. reducing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for the key processes delivered using SOA.
You can't buy SOA. SOA is not a product; it is a set of architectural concepts to develop a framework, a set of standards and (hopefully) a governance model. You may buy specific tools and services that are SOA-enabled, but this should only be when you already have the Architecture understood and agreed.
Web Services are not SOA. Most of the hype around SOA has been geared towards the development of XML and SOAP messages using HTTP. Web Services can be used as part of the delivery of rich business services with a Service Oriented Architecture, but SOA can exist and deliver benefit quite happily without Web Services. Many companies have managed to use Web Services to create another island of development standards that are not part of any enterprise architecture - typically increasing the chaos within IT delivery rather than improving the quality.
We will be publishing more war stories and examples of good and bad practice in future blogs.
John Moe
