SOA: Turf Wars can Sabotage Success

There have been endless articles, surveys and reports that are all glowingly positive about SOA and its potential as the next-generation architecture.  But as the number of adopters increase and the number of SOA deployments grow in size within organizations there are starting to be signs that SOA is not a panacea.

A number of technical issues around Web Services initially held back acceptance of SOA, but many of those objections have been addressed.  What can hold back its success?  People.

An article in SD Times suggests that SOA implementations are not immune from the ‘siloed application’ syndrome that has been the long-time bane of corportate IT applications.  And the problem is not so much a technical one.

SOA is touted as a superior and flexible approach for coupling services together in a reusable way across all business processes.  But, to date, what’s happened is that SOA has been implemented as multiple small prototypes and departmental solutions in the enterprise, not unlike a lot of earlier generation solutions.

When the multiple solutions need to be brought together to provide a bigger-picture solution, suddenly SOA becomes much more difficult, and much of the problem revolves around ownership — who and how will enterprise users support and pay for the services, who will test, update, and fix problems and provide enhancements for users of the service that are outside of the group hosting the service, etc.

Similar to Re-engineering and Workflow efforts of the 1990’s, SOA is facing a set of challenges that may be wound up in corportate politics and culture.  What makes these projects work is commitment and a champion at a senior level to provide support and backing.  Without high-level support, inevitable turf wars rear up that often roadblock or paralyze these kinds of large-scope projects.

Many SOA projects are being initiated as point solutions for address some problem with the current system.  The development and solution application tend to be fairly isolated.  In fact, less than 5 percent of SOA projects are enterprise-wide in scope. 

Without communication between groups, it is easy for isolated groups to work in parallel, rolling out multiple instances of services that perform similar or near-identical tasks.  The nature of SOA is to reduce redundancy and to introduce enterprise-wide standardization for performing common tasks.  Governance is the solution to this problem.

Despite potential issues with SOA, the trend is clear that more and more companies are adopting SOA.  And because of that, it is important for these companies to realize and implement strategies that incorporate culture/policy and governance in their strategies.