SOA: Growing up?

In the article What Must EA Do To Sustain SOA, Forrester basically tells architects to get out of the trees and do your job, and let others do theirs. Architectures are like children: you spawn them, nurture them, watch them grow but at some point you just have to let them go out on their own. The Forrester Topic Overview: Service Oriented Architecture confirms there is a lot at stake and hence it is easy to understand the reluctance of the architect to let go. But the architect has to believe that if they raised their architectures well then they should be able to survive in the real world.

What Must EA Do To Sustain SOA? by Alex Cullen – Forrester Research

The current form of EA leadership risks too much ownership by EA and not
enough by the organization. All too often, EA becomes:Too tactical. The EA group stays involved with individual services and loses focus on the overall strategy.

Too operational. EA gets pulled into an operational role — troubleshooting problems, managing enhancements, and monitoring service levels.Too involved. The rest of IT looks to EA whenever there is an issue or decision, hindering development of effective processes to manage these issues.

Topic Overview: Service-Oriented Architecture by Randy Heffner, Larry Fulton – Forrester Research

SOA is gaining recognition as a key element of strategic business transformation — a much higher level of business impact than mere application integration.

SOA’s ability to save IT costs and build business flexibility has driven broad adoption: 62% of enterprises are using or will use SOA by the end of 2007, and 40% of enterprises are using SOA for strategic business transformation.

55% to 70% of SOA users identified lowering business and application costs as drivers for SOA

75% to 85% of SOA users — identified improving business and application flexibility as drivers for SOA

It’s not just industry hype, either. SOA is delivering results that make people want more of it. Current SOA users report strong satisfaction with SOA: 70% of current enterprise SOA users say that they will increase their use of SOA, while only 3% will decrease their use.

In addition to SOA’s strategic business benefits, SOA also applies inside of IT, optimizing application integration scenarios, extending the life of existing applications, and increasing the flexibility of many types of IT-based business solutions.