Bread Today, Jam Tomorrow. Making SOA a Hit with Business Leaders
The dawn of any new age in computing comes with its false dawns, early warning bells signalling a lack of standards, security risks and promises from suppliers of silver-bullet solutions and quick fix panaceas. Small wonder that Service Oriented Architecture has been greeted with a bit of a depressed yawn from technology leaders and senior managers alike. But SOA will not go away. It is a necessary step change in accessibility to systems data within organizations, releasing data from back office databases to deliver a greater level of IT systems agility with the promise that, some day in the future, IT systems will always be able to stay in-tune with the needs of the organization they serve.
Implementing web services is not a quick fix. IT leaders are faced with justifying upfront a sizable IT infrastructure programme; the promise of bread today in return for jam tomorrow. The appetite for middleware investments within boardrooms has never been good (Most P&L holders don't understanding why they need glue-ware in the business anyway. They question why software they have already spent $millions on doesn't already share its information.) With the pace of change in global markets for goods and services cycling ever faster, business leaders are far more interested in prioritizing IT investment that delivers more customers to their door and eats away at operational overheads. Making the connection between this outcome and the long road of SOA implementation is no easy challenge for CIOs.
