I recently discussed the Gartner report that claimed SOA was in decline – see Is SOA Really on the Down Swing? Say it ain’t so Joe. I came across this humorous take on the matter from a Gartner analyst we have had the pleasure of talking to many times, Frank Kenney. He writes, Ahh Shucks, SOA Is A Failure. In this post, Frank offers a memo to be sent to senior management by someone leading a SOA failure.
The memo begins with “under my direction... I have failed to associate our SOA initiatives with our business needs, therefore I cannot show any value for the hundreds of services we have created, I have failed to properly create and support an SOA Center of Excellence, Steering Committee or Competency Center, I have failed to enlist the executive staff as true supporters and evangelists for our SOA efforts...” It goes on and lists all the things you should do to make SOA successful that this person did not implement. It concludes, “Thanks for understanding and I’d like to declare in advance that Cloud Computing, Virtualization and SaaS will be failures under my direction as well.”
So who wants to sign off on killing SOA in their company?
SOA does require some new approaches, as well as some sound traditional business practices. It is not plug & play. If this approach is taken it will be more plug and pray. We are seeing SOA adoption holding strong but it needs to follow the success factors of governance: policy, management and validation-related -- that we have discussed at length here -- or stakeholders will be disappointed. Thanks to Frank for bringing some humor and good business sense to the debate.
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