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SOA Watch: New economic realities

By David S. Linthicum

November 17, 2008 — (Page 1 of 2)
With the economic picture still looking bleak, many enterprises are making changes where they can so that the business operates better within the current economic turmoil. New product lines need to be added or deleted, core processes must shift, and all of the adjustments should be made without additional cost or undue disruption.

The unfortunate truth is that the static and fragile nature of enterprise architectures has left IT scrambling to adapt to the new needs of the business. Those that have not embraced agile concepts are having a very rough time. As one enterprise architect friend of mine said, "It would be nice to have an agile architecture now. It would be nice to have leveraged the notions of SOA … too late now, Dave."

What’s core to this issue is the fact that order, stability and agility have too often been trumped by tactical needs and by the drive to hit quarterly sales numbers. Thus, new websites, portals and enterprise applications were tossed into the architectural mix without a thought for integration or synergy with other enterprise processes. That layering of technology has created the complex mess we have today and has driven IT costs sky high. Now that belts are tightening and things need to change, the architectural mess is the largest obstacle.

Enterprises suffer when their applications, databases, services, governance and processes are not sufficiently flexible to meet changing business needs—and these days, many businesses are in flux. It’s no wonder, then, that despite the downturn and turmoil, there seem to be five SOA architect jobs for every qualified candidate. Enterprises now understand how much the limitations of their current information technology are hurting the business, and they are reacting (notice I did not say they are being proactive).

IT must react to the new business needs, but it just doesn’t have the tools to do so. The changes should have been made years ago. My phone is ringing off the hook around this issue, but there are no quick and tactical ways to achieve agility. It's a highly structured, evolutionary process that requires the cooperation of the entire organization, from the executives down to the developers.

Related Search Term(s): agile programming, professional development, SOA

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