PERSPECTIVES

SOA in the City
by Julie Tangen, February 2006

Last week I attended InfoWorld's SOA Executive Forum in San Francisco, which brought together enterprise vendors, industry experts, and people like me who came to learn more about this strange animal we call SOA. I believe the most profound message that came across through customer stories, vendor presentations and hallway discussions, is this: After years of trying to figure out SOA, it is still a complete mystery to so many people.

Today organizations are scrambling to move away from the complex architectures that once made sense. However because so many of these companies already have a large number of legacy assets in place, they don't want to throw everything away and start over. Rather, companies want to squeeze every last bit of value out of a system that they've already paid for, and one way of doing this is bringing the mainframe into an SOA environment.

Don't try this at home, folks. We know from listening to SOA early adopters that it's a nice idea, but a lot harder than it looks. I had the opportunity to share a table with a CIO who had a lot of wonderful things to say about where SOA is headed and how it might make sense in his company. However he said achieving a "true" SOA will not happen at his company (in his lifetime, that is) because in the eyes of the business, SOA is a technology. And projects that fall into the "technology" category must often times make way
for other initiatives that (sigh) "meet business requirements." This is interesting to me—I was under the impression that there is more to SOA than just the technology aspect. As we peel the onion, aren't we starting to see this as more of an enterprise-wide initiative than a single IT project?

There is no arguing that there are many sophisticated approaches and technologies available today to make all this SOA "stuff" work. However I believe that actually achieving an SOA will not only call for changes across IT and the business, but also require a major shift in how all sides of the business think and work together. I look forward to watching the advances in SOA over the coming months and seeing you at the next industry event. Pretty cool stuff!