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SOA: Determining the Right Metrics
Proponents of SOA have long argued the benefits of the SOA for IT. But this year has seen a backlash on SOA and a general questioning of its ROI.
Joe McKendrick and David Linthicum suggests that ROI can only be demonstrated when the right metrics are applied. They look to some recent studies that describe some metrics that could be useful in measuring SOA ROI:
Service Vitality Index – a measure of the revenue generated from new services over the last 12 months
Reuse – the number of services that are reused across applications and processes
Agility – The ability of IT to work with business to quickly deliver on business requirements
Linthicum says that “Measuring both reuse and agility takes some thinking and some planning, but it’s easy to establish the metrics and the approaches that work for your enterprise.” Easier said than done. Reuse is something that can be clearly measured, but reuse alone does not equate to ROI. The Service Vitality Index suggests a measurement approach but associating revenues to services which are often very granular is not clear cut.
And Agility is something that is even more difficult to quantify.
The idea of usnig metrics to prove the value of SOA is a good one, but coming up with the metrics is something that is much much harder. A lot more work is needed to come up with really good metrics.
