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SOA: Four Roadblocks to SOA Success
SOA is becoming accepted as a ‘Best Practice’. And adoption rates of SOA are soaring. But that doesn’t mean that SOA doesn’t have its warts too. An article on TechTarget highlights some perspectives of SOA thought-leaders about some aspects of SOA that are less than perfect.
1. Complexity. Or what Gartner’s Roy Schulte refers to as the problem of “Too Many Moving Parts”. SOA provides a framework for being able to consolidate data sources and services from many sources in a platform agnostic way. An advantage of SOA is that once the framework is in place, incremental upgrades to the individual service components allows functionality within the system to evolve quickly. This avoids the nightmare associated with all-or-nothing upgrades typical of monolithic applications. But when all the pieces of the system are moving along different version pathways, the system becomes incredibly complex and there are many issues raised around governance, configuration, testing and version control.
2. SOA projects needs to be better aligned with business goals. Redmonk’s James Governor criticizes many companies as approaching SOA as a “Science Project”. Technology driven solely for the sake of technology seldom solves business problems. The ‘A’ in SOA is about architecture and that component is often overlooked in favor of ‘S’, the services.
3. SOA needs to be adopted with an enterprise mindset. Eric Newcomer, CTO of Iona Technologies, comments that it is hard for companies to change their mindset from one where component/service software is developed and purchased at the department level. Architecture needs to be driven more by a big-picture approach where services can be developed that are useful across departments and throughout the enterprise.
4. Lack of SOA-skilled resources and personnel. Ron Schmeltzer of ZapThink comments that the demand for enterprise architect resources outstrips the pool of available resources.
A lot of the hype behind SOA is not without merit, but like anything else, it has its own set of issues and problems.
