SOA, business media and viewpoints
When the business press dissects aspects of a technology, one can be assured of one thing: your business users are going to expect that you and your CTO deliver on the promises that the ‘case studies’ they are reading about deliver to those clients. [Note to regulars on the blog: This entry is about a few observations on SOA, not necessarily on offshoring.]
Two articles on the topic make for an interesting read. One is a Harvard Business Review (HBR) Case study (July-August'07) “Too Far Ahead of the IT Curve?” and another is the article “'SOA' Stirs a Computing Buzz” in Wall Street Journal (WSJ) today (17 Jul’07). Both write-ups are targeted at a c-level business audience though the slant of each is towards the different ends of the spectrum: the HBR case study prompts the reader to ponder while the WSJ motivates the reader to act.
The WSJ article quotes Vladimir Mitevski, vice president of product management for Thomson Financial who says “it once took six weeks and roughly 20 people to build, deploy and maintain service offerings for Thomson One, a software platform for the financial industry. After adopting a service-oriented architecture, in part using software from Hewlett-Packard Co., Mr. Mitevski says a single programmer working with various businesses, quality testing and support groups within the company can deploy new and updated offerings in as little as 15 minutes. He cites "speed to market" as his No. 1 reason for adopting the methodology.”
The HBR case study concludes with Candace Markovich (CIO) contemplating how “SOA was potentially the migration path to a transformative way of creating technology capability” with a caution “so you can imagine how it might not totally thrill me to think about spending a bazillion dollars on a brand-new, shiny dinosaur that we’d be stuck with at a point in history when IT world is moving someplace else… but I can see the logic in making it, because SOA is still kind of a crapshoot.”
Though my colleague and friend Binooj does not address the question posted in HBR case study, he is perhaps addressing the issue with a sourcing dimension when he says:
Contrary to the notion of big systems, monoliths or all in one-systems, SOA proposes a modular sourcing approach. Instead of making investment on one big technology or one big product and committed to that for years to come, enterprises are contemplating to adopt modular solutions with smaller investments, with faster time to market and eventually replaceable with latest technologies with out huge reinvestments. Success stories related to Software as a Service (SaaS) providers such as salesforce.com or Amazon marketplace, shows the early signs of such flexible solutions. In addition to leveraging external providers, enterprise IT organizations are expanding the meaning of [internal] ‘shared services’ from conventional candidates such as finance and HR systems to essential [common] capabilities of identity and access management, content management, document generation and so on.
Well, why the musing on the topic? Because in my recent engagements with clients, I increasingly come across the musings of Candace: CIOs trying to juggle myriad priorities while also trying to deliver on the successes like Vladimir Mitevski
Footnote (should be obvious…but still): the names quoted in this are verbatim, not necessarily the people I have interacted with.
