OPINION:

An SOA State of Mind

By Mark Hall

Service-oriented architecture is not the next “rapid prototyping,” “extreme programming” or other trendy IT development technique. Done right, it’s a state of mind for your entire business.

And it’s one that’s catching on fast. So you’d better get cracking, because your company’s competitors are already embracing the SOA mind-set.

Aberdeen Group surveyed 284 Global 2,000 companies and learned that 68% were engaged in SOA projects in 2005. By 2007, that figure will skyrocket to 98%. It’s easy to see why. Big companies expect to save as much as $53 billion between 2006 and 2010 simply by applying SOA principles to application development and deployment. Most of the savings will come from being able to reuse fully tested and proven code.

Since everyone will get their share of SOA’s inherent operational savings, becoming an SOA shop won’t give you a unique competitive advantage. The critical part of adopting it will be in how you implement SOA to create business opportunities.

Think of SOA like PCs in the 1980s. You knew PCs would be ubiquitous inside your company as well as within your competitors’ businesses. Going with SOA, like adopting PCs, is a no-brainer. As I said, it’s how you do it that takes a little gray matter.

When PCs first arrived, most IT execs were happy to let users buy them and share information via sneaker-net — passing 5 1/4-in. floppy discs around the office. But true IT leaders quickly pushed their companies toward networked PCs with mobile capabilities running distributed applications that added business value throughout their organization

The same will be true for SOA. It won’t be enough that you litter your code with SOAP envelopes and memorize your industry’s XML vocabulary. You’ll need to build an SOA infrastructure that makes it possible for end users to exploit the technology.

How will you do that?

For starters, don’t think of the software components as part of the IT department’s arsenal. Make them part of your company’s business weaponry. Push component access, detailed descriptions and usage examples out to end users. Give them easy-to-use tools that show them how to combine, compile and, yes, deploy their own homegrown applications just as users built and shared their own Excel macros.

But there’s a big difference. When end users created value with Excel, for example, IT surrendered part of its leadership to Microsoft. In that case, end users knew it was Bill Gates & Co. that gave them the capability to do new things for the business, not you. With SOA, however, you can foster an environment to liberate end users from getting into an IT application-development queue. One approach is to create a SOA SWAT team and make it available to assist end users struggling with component programming and to test end users’ final code.

Sure, SOA is an opportunity to save big IT operation dollars. But more important, it’s a chance to let end users create major business value while enhancing IT’s reputation.

Hall is editor at large and a columnist at Computerworld.
You can contact him at mark_hall@computerworld.com.