James Governor on Combining Cost Reduction with Innovation Through SOA

James Governor, co-founder of RedMonk, recently spoke at IBM Virtual Global SOA Forum. Joe McKendrick provides a transcript of his talk on ebizQ, "Work Smarter, Take Out Costs In a Tough Economy." He begins with saying that he "wants to talk about culture, because service oriented architecture clearly sounds like something technical, but really if you want to succeed, its going to be all about the people."

He goes on to say that SOA is the language of change. SOA was started, in part, to enable businesses to become more flexible. "Enterprise customers were concerned that their cost of integration was very high. Once they had built a system, effectively, they poured concrete onto it." This probably affected the thinking about business process and the ability to innovate, and not simply the technology components.

In today's economy, change is needed more than ever. It now takes on two components, the ability to quickly adapt to changing market conditions, and the ability to do this in a cost effective manner. Though SOA was once an overhyped term, there is a "little soa" in the way companies are now quietly using service-oriented approaches to create real value.

"Little soa" encompasses everything else lumped under flexibly leveraging technology to meed business needs - from BPM to integration platforms, rich Internet apps and REST-based approaches that have business services under the covers. "Little soa" can address both of these components and hopefully changes the way people think about innovation and the capacity to engage in it and implement it. This is where the people side of technology comes in.

James goes on to say, “We're going along this road, and it’s very important that we need frankly, a fast car that will keep us on the road. And SOA is a language that the business can talk to IT and systems, in order to stay on that road. In order to have alignment, so that we can move forward, and actually deal with change, and deal with these curves that we're being thrown."

He later mentions virtualization. This is one way to keep the fast car moving forward and stay on the road at lower cost. We have been covering this in our series on Field Reports on SOA Success. See for example, Part Five: Major Airlines. Here the airline was able to virtualize the kinds of services that are normally prohibitively costly and complex to replicate using conventional means, and keep their SOA development and testing on track.

(Concrete Photo by Brenda Anderson and Car Lights Photo by miss blackbutterfly both from Flickr.)

Comments

[Rowan]

Another interesting SOA event coming up is IBM's Virtual Forbidden City SOA tour on 28th & 29th April. Designed to demonstrate the business benefits of SOA and address some of the issues mentioned here, a team of IBM's top SOA experts will lead a tour of the virtual Forbidden City, talking about its SOA foundations as they go.