Who pays the bill for enterprise SOA initiatives?
Your company is in Fortune 500 or 5000; an Oil & Gas major with north of 200 billion in revenue or privately owned ‘niche’ with south of a billion in revenue, it does not matter. The question is the same: who will fund the SOA initiatives in the enterprise?
The answer is simple: everybody and nobody.
As Steven Johnson articulates in his book, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, often the SOA investments are never from a single source. Inline with the core principles of SOA i.e. the distributed nature of enterprise systems, the investments comes from varying sources. Johnson’s basic theory goes likes this. “An individual ant, like an individual neuron, is just about as dumb as can be. Connect enough of them together properly, though, and you get spontaneous intelligence. (source: amazon.com)”.
In an organization, the individual business computations wrapped in services are like ants. In isolation, the services may be less intelligent and less agile. The ability to create different formations from services in a flexible manner provides the agility that organizations often aspire for. Often the funding to create this formation comes from more than one source.
Often, organizations spends IT dollars in
1) Sustenance of the existing application and infrastructure
2) Revitalizing existing platforms (e.g. platform migration) and
3) Developing new systems and platforms based on business initiatives.
Each of the above sources of money can become donors to SOA initiatives. The following three examples provides their contribution to Enterprise SOA
1) Through sustenance dollars, the information on legacy applications portfolios can be created, which can be become the cornerstone of legacy service harvesting initiatives.
2) While platform revitalizing efforts are taking place, organizations can make sure that the new platforms support SOA capabilities.
3) Business services can be realized through new development activities.
To make this enterprise service ecosystem work, organization would need a SOA vision, future state blueprint, execution roadmap and governance model that can tie the different initiatives in the organization together. This upfront, but loosely coupled, planning provides the rich environment that encourages the service orientation and makes the emergence of a ‘connected’ enterprise.
Comments
Interesting tpoic, the other question might be who pays the bill for email, desktop and security. SOA enabling technologies must be viewed as nothing more than shared services, with proper charge back mechanism (user pays). Where IT has gone from Automation of Business to Information Management and now Business Transformation it is hard to give tangible value to architectures like SOA.
Posted by: Shaji | December 19, 2006 03:55 AM
I think the simple answer to the question is the vendor must pay!
SoA lies in the eye of the beholder. SoA to one can be a Bunch of Web Services - BOWS - to other. (Did I coin a new term here?)
The reality of the fact is that all these 'SoA' projects are necessitated by the fact that vendors aren't supporting older platforms. Take for example, Microsoft. Why would an enterprise that built its applications in VB6 want to 're-engineer' their applications to .NET Web Services? The answer is simple - because VB6 is being desupported by Microsoft in 2008.
So essentially all of us are at the mercy of these vendors!
Posted by: Neeraj Kulkarni | January 18, 2007 11:47 PM