SOA Watch: New economic realities

By David S. Linthicum

November 17, 2008 —

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.

My recommendation is that you get the smartest people in the company working on this issue, hire some good consultants and put together a plan—now—that attacks the most critical issues in order of priority. Over time, things will get better. But perhaps the current scare will provide enough incentive to get companies moving on agile processes. Those businesses that are able to provide the most agility are the ones that will win their markets, in down and up economies.

The fundamental approach is pretty basic. Divide the business into functional domains that can be addressed individually. Put those domains in priority order. Then, working from domain to domain, break things down to their functional primitives, and then define them at the semantic, service and process levels. You’ll have to deal with the existing technology and determine the new technology that will be needed to complete the architecture, which will come from the requirements of the business and not from some magazine.

Keep in mind that the temptation here is to look for “SOA-in-a-box” solutions, or perhaps purchase an über-stack from one of the larger SOA vendors. But SOA isn’t something you buy, it’s something you do. The process is 95% hard work and analysis, and only 5% technology. The technology is always easy; the architecture is not. The technology solves nothing without a sound architecture. Sorry, no short cuts.

For most businesses, the idea of hiring and driving a strategic project is counterintuitive during hard economic times. But if the goal is saving money by becoming more efficient, there is a huge upside, and not just for this year and next.

The struggle will be to get everyone to understand the larger picture and invest the needed resources. The best way to focus on this issue is to model the business benefits, including ROI. That means you must understand the value of agility and the cost of the inefficiencies within the business, and then show how a good architectural rejuvenation, using SOA, will go directly to the bottom line.

You’ll likely be surprised to find how many dollars are being blown and how much better the business will perform when supported by an IT infrastructure that has been designed to change. Remember, that’s how business needs to think, in good times or bad.

Reach analyst David S. Linthicum at david@linthicumgroup.com.

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

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