Consider that there is a cost reduction or profit motive to an SOA initiative. Also consider that I’ve already seen a financial incentive to those who successfully create reusable services that are leveraged throughout the organization. Before long, you realize that SOA is likely to create a competitive marketplace for services within an organization.
This marketplace will have most or all of the common attributes of any other marketplace, i.e.: promotion, profit incentive, and a winner and loser type mentality to those participants in the marketplace.
This is a good thing. The alternative is hope that altruism reigns throughout organizations and people make corporate decisions with no financial incentive to do so. Good luck!
Let’s walk through a scenario: Let’s say that I create a service that I wish to offer for reuse across the enterprise. In order to do so I must meet certain objectives, certain criteria that make it available for reuse. In doing so, I have to create additional investment before there’s ever any reuse possible. To justify this, my consumers are going to end up either directly or indirectly compensating me for the additional burden of creating that reusable service and at the very least maintaining their behavioral expectations on my services over time.
As soon as this occurs, (as soon as the producer is getting financially compensated for creating the reusable service) I’ve just reduced the cost of producing the service. There goes the marketplace.
(now I’m going to put on a divisional development director kind of hat…)
My goal becomes: To see how many globally reusable services I can mine from my requirements. I will begin promoting my development of those services. In fact, I’ll make sure that my teams will do the best job in producing those kinds of services so that I can cover the long term needs of the enterprise, thereby defraying the cost of producing these applications that have caused the construction of those services. If I’m better at it than the other guys across the organization, my services will tend to get leveraged more than theirs, and my budget indirectly grows.
The phenomenon here is simple enough: all it takes is to incent SOA is money. Since we can’t expect SOA to survive long-term with the concept of “free beer” reuse, or “anarchy,” we’re going to have more pay-for-use kinds of consumption of services.
Now this doesn’t mean that there’s likely to be some kind of transaction meter deployed in the infrastructure, or that consumers in one division will have to negotiate a price to buy those services, that’s not what I’m saying (this could be, but I doubt that it will happen in all but the rarest of cases). What I’m saying is that budget allocated to Division “A” to build an application that is at least partially consumed by using other services in Division “B” will create a horizontal shift in that budget.
If project “A” gets a million dollars to build a project, but $200,000 of that million goes to the producer in a different division to maintain an existing service, that is a net decrease in the budget of that project and a net increase in that other division’s budget. This will create that competitive marketplace.
Those who produce the best services and get them leveraged through reuse will become more critical to the business overall, and will be able to demand more budget; and will, in fact will be getting more budget. Those who do not over time will get smaller and smaller budgets. Even if the real dollars don’t change, the net dollars do - because there’s more shifting across the organization instead of direct build and maintenance of their own services.
One more way to look at it: If one division does a great job and three divisions do very poor jobs of producing reusable services, those other three divisions will ultimately become more business process level development teams while that first division will not only build their own applications but be the primary authors of all the core services. Thus the budgetary allocations will reflect that.
So when I mentioned this to Jason Bloomberg some time ago, he equated it to a “survival of the fittest” SOA mentality. I don’t think of it that way; I think it’s good old market dynamics. It’s healthy within an organization for those who do the best job to be empowered to do more and for those who don’t to reap their reward as well.