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SOA: Develop a Five-Year Plan for SOA Excellence
Another study has been released, this time by Butler and DataMonitor, predicting a slow but steady move towards industry-wide acceptance of SOA as the enterprise architecture of choice. By 2012 Butler foresees a new landscape in businesses where IT interacts with the rest of the enterprise in a way that is much different than it does today.
The Butler/DataMonitor study surveyed 90 US and European companies and their results mirror those of a number of other similar studies. The Butler study found that SOA is on the radar for most organizations, and many companies have dabbled in the technology or started pilots, but full implementations have been limited to companies in the technology and financial industries sectors.
30% of those surveyed have started SOA trials. But adoptors have run into some roadblocks centered around security, performance, reliability and data management. In particular, in the area of security, users have identified the need for more sophisticated access control.
The IT department also needs to be remolded to support a different type of infrastructure that can address the performance requirements of a layered, services-based environment.
SOA implementations allow organizations to squeeze more value from their IT dollars, saving them money in integrating software, providing greater reuse, and increased flexibility. But the study found that the high level of hype surrounding SOA has brought with it some confusion and a misunderstanding about how to go about building an SOA environment.
As many others recommend, Butler also advises a policy of starting SOA with a global view and then slowly building out that world perspective by implementing small projects that can address specific business requirements. A reasonable approach is to have a five year plan, starting in 2007, that can significantly push organizations into broad SOA architectures by 2012.
To quench the demand for SOA-savvy IT professionals, many vendors are providing more education about SOA. This week, for example, IBM announced their plans to open eight SOA Leadership centers (SLC) around the world that would provide education, training, implementation and demonstration of SOA technologies.
