In today's tough economy, you can't even read an article that doesn't start out: "In today's tough economy..." This one is no different. Fortunately when it comes to IT, the message does not need to be accompanied with knee-jerk cost-cutting measures.
Last month Todd Biske offered some solid advice on what to do in today's down economy in his post, "Don’t Go On an IT Diet, Change Your Behavior". Needless to say, his post remains relevant. I especially liked his comments:
“The whole point of Enterprise Architecture, SOA, and many of these other strategic IT initiatives is to allow IT to be more agile- to respond more quickly to changes in the business objectives. Guess what? We’re in the middle of a big unprecedented change in our lifetime. My guess is that the best survivors of this meltdown will be organizations that don’t go on a starvation diet, but instead simply recognize that their priorities and goals have changed and execute without significant disruption to the way they utilize IT.”
Todd also wrote that cost cutting efforts to respond to the economy should not mean that organizations drop their SOA initiatives, or other long-term initiatives, especially when most of these efforts are trying to reduce costs cost by eliminating redundancy in the enterprise. It would be ironic as these efforts are exactly what are needed today.
SOA efforts should be more closely managed and held to their ROI objectives in any economy - otherwise, they will not have a chance to create the value you expected. It may be that closer review will actually improve the number of SOA efforts that are successful, as people will be more highly motivated to get them right. There is no time for poor execution now but there is a lot of room for innovation. As Jonathan Schwartz, the Sun COO, wrote in "Innovation Loves a Crisis," now is the time to make changes that will make you most adaptive to the new economy and best positioned to come out of the downturn on top.
McKinsey also supported this strategic thinking in their report, "Leading through uncertainty": “The task of business leaders must be to overcome the paralysis that dooms any organization, and to begin shaping the future.” Transforming to SOA - not because it's "cool" but because we have real value expectations, is one way to become more flexible and cost effective at the same time.
Accompanying that, we are also sure to mention Service Virtualization as a key means of increasing the availability of SOA assets in the lifecycle, at a small fraction of the environmental cost. It is money well spent not just in terms of cost savings, but more so in coming out of a lean time with a more agile and efficiently delivering dev and test organization.
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