Blogger: Richard Watson
As recently as June I was worried about too much funding available for projects hampering SOA initiatives. Well, that’s worked itself out, hasn't it!
While the point I was making – that funding tactical line-of-business projects does not create the culture of reuse and incentives needed for SOA to flourish – is still valid, the circumstances budget holders now find themselves in are very different, as Richard Veryard comments.
The Economist is calling 2009 “The year of the CFO”
“Execution” will no longer be a management fad, it will be a part of daily life. We will hear less of “vision” and much more of “value”.
So proving value to the CFO will be paramount for survival of your SOA initiatives.
Steve Jones recently gave us a timely reboot on business driven SOA:
So look at the business model, look at the business services and think "If I had half the budget what could I do and what would really have an impact"
In the struggle for financial survival, where every dollar is scrutinized, tied to value and all discretionary spending postponed, my paradox has been replaced by another, a version of what economist John Maynard Keynes called the “paradox of thrift”. The Economist describes it here:
Every firm does what is prudent for itself, but by cutting its spending it slows down the economy still further and thus hurts everybody, including itself. This will only reinforce the need for expansionary monetary and fiscal policy [...] to boost demand; and also for more direct support in credit markets, such as the Federal Reserve’s prop for the commercial-paper market (already tapped by some large American firms).
These are vital tasks for politicians and regulators, but for managers the paradox works the other way: spending money might be in society’s interests, but not in their shareholders’. For a whole generation of bosses, what they do in the next few months may come to define the rest of their careers.
So, there’s less oxygen for everyone, but who is squeezed tighter in this new thrifty environment? Vendors (especially those whose fortunes are aligned with Wall St., e.g. Sun, TIBCO) and System Integrators (Accenture for example is initiating a voluntary redundancy programme in Ireland) are two squeezed groups.
Who has a chance to shine? Organizations promoting and using open source software effectively, for a start. Anne Thomas Manes debunks the myth that doing SOA is expensive. As Anne says, much can be achieved by combining open source SOA infrastructure with smart people to harness it. Chris Swan questions the support and maintenance “benefits” of commercial closed source software that we blithely assume is a risk mitigation strategy. Organizations that have squirreled their nuts away in the summer, and have a mature service modeling practice and the lean portfolio to go with it, can reap the benefits of outsourcing or exploiting SaaS.
I’m going to be writing a lot and working with clients in the next 12 months on strategies for showing CFOs the value from SOA.
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