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SOA: Debate on Measuring the ROI
The Datamation article in Does SOA have an ROI has kicked off a debate about SOA and its benefits.
A clear measure of SOA’s success is the overwhelming acceptance of it as a best-practice architecture. Gartner found that 44 percent of companies with less than 1000 employees consider deploying SOA for their organizations as a high-priority. And at big companies, those with 40,000 or more employees, 67 percent say that they will be using SOA before the end of 2006.
But what is SOA contributing in terms of reduced costs and ROI? Some think that the ROI is very hard to measure. Gartner’s Randy Heffner says “Any attempt to assign a specific ROI to SOA should be viewed with heavy skepticism”.
The Gartner argument is that SOA is an architecture and platform — not a solution, and ROI should be measured against solutions. SOA may be contributing some weighted amount towards the success of a complete solution but exactly what weight percentage to assign to SOA is hard to quantify.
Short term, adoption of SOA may require more planning and that in turn can mean higher budget and result in longer schedules. SOA is better viewed as a more strategic move rather than one that immediately contributes to the bottom line.
Gartner notes that longer term SOA’s benefits can be many and include:
- Access to new major markets
- Better customer loyalty
- Reduced application maintenance
- Greater Flexibility in IT infrastructure
But some think that ROI metrics relative to SOA are not totally unmeasurable. They advocate an approach of looking at SOA benefits relative to early pilot and departmental projects. Looking at incremental differences in costs between successive projects should begin to show the benefits of SOA as reusability kicks in and new projects can take advantage of a growing SOA infrastructure.
