Consolidating SOA stories

Blogger: Chris Haddad

During the past three months, we have been collecting SOA stories. Even though Anne and I have talked with hundreds of IT professionals over the past four years, we felt obtaining a fresh perspective to the SOA conundrum would be beneficial. Burton Group's SOA research team met in Florida last week to consolidate several client interviews, identify trends, and divine insights. We reviewed client interviews spanning banking, insurance, investment, government, systems integrator, telecommunications, hospitality, and retail organizations. In many organizations, we captured data points across multiple stakeholders. During the consolidation process, we used a manual, low-tech approach to view and consolidate the information. Data points were printed out on 3X3 papers and literally thrown on the walls. Setting appropriate SOA expectations requires  listening and analysis skills to understand the rich context surrounding SOA success factors and success killers. Over a period of three days, our team of seven experts (with representatives from Identity, Security, Application, Executive Advisory, and Consulting teams) analyzed and arranged data points.

At the end of the week, all four walls and the entry hallway were papered with information. Our war room delivered an immersing experience reminiscent of Spielberg's Minority Report, but without dazzling special effects. Patterns quickly emerged and the team crafted high level topics, categories, and section headings. 

The analysis also generated key insights and relationships. Information flowed into twelve different topic areas:

• Lessons learned
• Roadmap
• Goals
• Advocacy
• Sponsorship
• Sphere of influence
• Adoption
• Funding
• Business case
• Culture and collaboration
• People relationships and roles
• Organization
• Education
• Governance guiding SOA implementation
• Service portfolio planning
• Infrastructure
• Projects

Surprisingly, interviewees talked more about culture and people  instead of technology. Stay tuned for deep insights as we continue to normalize SOA CR information, rethink success factors, and tune our  recommendations.

Comments

[Donald Chi]

It is not surprising at all about your finding more talk about culture and people instead of technology. Technology is no problem; in fact technology is quite mature and we have just about all we need.
I have functioned as a champion for SOA,BPM, orchestration, grid computing, etc. to achieve agile business and IT. The IT is broken and we as a nation have wasted millions and millions of failed and lousy applications.
The problem is that totally insufficient number of people understand the entire "application infrastructure" & organization to realize the agility through the new application development paradigm. The developers push back because they would have to learn new ideas and skills. It may reveal their lack of marketability. The project managers push back because they don't want their project to get delayed and moreover they really don't understand it. The bottom-up approach often creates chaos because they tend to create services and still retain the point-to-point connectivity and also create new "SOA" silos. This leaves a bad taste in those who have to fund it.

The situation is fairly much the same as the predicament PKI was in several years ago. Now it is common solution to identity management and information security. It will take a generation of new IT and business analysts to rise up before "SOA" concepts can take off because educational process is slow. The universities haven't caught up and the technical education institutions have not caught up either.

There are only a few success stories. To me, the outlook for "SOA" is bleak for another few years of drought. Just hope that so many good products and good companies would be able to survive this period.