SOA is SOL without BPM - Bringing IT and the Business Together

SOA is SOL without BPM - Bringing IT and the Business Together
By: Rob Risany, Director of Product Marketing, Savvion

How many times have you heard that SOA is the next big thing? It’s particularly fascinating how the perspectives of customers and vendors evolve on “the latest thing” and where they find the value. The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) wars have been interesting to watch for exactly this reason. Integration vendors, pure-play BPM vendors and leading application platforms all have an SOA story. The major vendors have focused education efforts on teaching people what SOA is, and how it can make their infrastructures more “agile”. And while attendance in forums on the topic is still high, SOA strategy and execution is failing in many companies.

Take, for example, a recent Forrester Research Survey that found 38% of companies with more than 1,000 employees are not using SOA and have no plans to. Of the companies that are using SOA in some form or fashion, 40% haven’t begun or are using SOA with no clear strategy in place. The 80/20 rules seems to imply that 80% of people don’t and won’t get SOA in the organization.

One key reason is that the SOA value proposition is fundamentally unimportant to business people who, after all, bankroll new technology initiatives. It's just another way to implement an application. What's more important to business managers is how they can change, through technology, how their businesses are run. And that's where BPM comes in. If the world's biggest-budgeted software vendors really want to have sponsors in both IT and business units, and keep selling software, they need to elevate the role BPM plays in their suites.

Indifference in the field

To add some color to these statistics, these vignettes illustrate the trouble SOA, on it’s own, faces:

At a major industry conference an IT executive from a major bank was expounding on their success in migrating to an SOA in the business. He had SOAPs and WSDLs and fine grained web services – he had API wrappers, BPEL orchestration and data models. About 20 minutes into his exposition on the architectural approach that this 24 month project has taken, the attendee sitting next to me leaned over said “who cares about this anyway? Does this guy think business people CARE?!”

I led a panel discussion – this one geared solely to an IT audience. I asked a question of the panel. “SOA – friend or foe of the business?” Every person on the panel, including one employed by a Fortune 50 company said “it should never be discussed with the business” – it needed to be neither seen nor heard.

At a recent conference a successful SOA architect / project program leader laid out a few different options for deploying SOA. These included

1. Creating a global SOA strategy and push it into every bit of the business - force SOA everywhere, all at once.
2. Implement SOA as part of each point project. He referred to it as the “bury approach” as it was designed to bury the costs of SOA implementation under the radar;
3. Just “say you’re doing SOA” and then ignore it altogether – the rationale being that most business people don’t know what it is anyway. So long as you can say that “it’s a priority” you sound like you’re doing the right thing – then the pursuit of the status quo is at least given a veneer of “service-centricity”

Source: For more information, please visit http://www.soainstitute.org/articles/article/article/soa-is-sol-without-bpm-bringing-it-and-the-business-together.html