SOA on the fast track
Being privy to multiple SOA projects in different continents and stages gives some interesting insights. Technology is hardly a problem, but it is always mentioned. With so many intelligent people around, I have reasonable confidence in stating that if a problem can be identified it can be solved.
So, what are some the real problems:
- SOA changes the basic definition of roles
- Funding of SOA projects today and chargeback models
SOA changes the basic definition of roles: Looking ahead 5-10 years, business analysts will morph into domain architects who can write WSDLs, look up services and orchestrate their own applications. Similarly application developers will become service or process developers. There will be infrastructure architects who don’t size the platform but the service. Similarly CIO/ CTO and Enterprise architect roles need to be base-lined and evolved.
What I am saying is that change management is a bigger piece of the SOA puzzle than technology. It is more important to address this if the organization wants to succeed. Many CIOs are hiding from this reality. Technology at this point is incidental.
Funding of SOA projects today and chargeback models: This by far is the most complicated statistical and mathematical adventure. The project funding model today in most US organizations is to have a “business case” for a business user who also sponsors this development. The development is then done by IT. These are, conventionally, silo applications with no intent of reuse. SOA breaks this basic funding process by its foundation on reuse. So how will funding happen in future? Consider these scenarios:
- There is an urgent business need for compliance in an organization that has decided that all future development should be “SOA” oriented and must go through a-b-c steps to get started even if the business has funds to run it.
- There is a corporate mandate that all new business requirements will be decomposed into a set of services which can be reused by other geographies, lines of business in the organization. Funding will come from the central pool (CIOs office for infrastructure) and Business CEOs/ VPs for their functional components.
- Chargeback model: This will encourage spend in building and adopting SOA based services where a business unit that has the first need will need to fund the building of the service. After this, they can chargeback usage to other units utilizing this service. What determines the cost of the service? Internal revenue transfers will be a whole new paradigm. How will non-revenue services like Marketing, HR etc be able to pay for utilizing these services?
In one organization where point 3 above was implemented after considerable deliberation, there were no takers for almost 4 weeks. In week 5, there were multiple simultaneous requests to build services with dramatic urgency even though there was no apparent business need!
Digging in revealed that the business units had decided to “make money” on the chargeback model and were now cornering the most obvious useable service and had found deep pockets to fund it.
There are many similar areas that are not technical nor standards related, that need to be resolved through leadership, governance and simplicity.
