How to prepare your 2008 SOA budget?

Posted by Jean-Jacques Dubray on Sep 25, 2007

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Enterprise Architecture

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Governance ,

SOA

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ROI

This is budget season for some of us, and many questions may come to mind as we prepare our 2008 SOA budget. Where to start? How to quickly demonstrate value? How to increase our maturity over time? Where do we source our skills?

Last week, Jeff Schneider, CEO of MomentumSI, explained why ROI cannot be achieved in the early months of a SOA program:

I've said it before and I'll say it again... SOA Transformations cost big bucks, take years to complete but in the end are worth the investment.

This has prompted some to start talking about a potential SOA backlash as Lorraine Lawson reports.

According to Nucleus Research, an IT research firm, a mere 37 percent of companies report a positive return on investment for their SOA implementations.

Jeff provides some real numbers from the field which could prove helpful for companies starting their SOA initiatives in 2008. He addresses the need to create a SOA foundation as the initial step of any SOA initiative. The foundation includes SOA Strategy & Roadmap, SOA Methodology, SOA Reference Architecture, Standards Development and SOA Governance Planning. He suggests to continue the initiative with SOA training and change management, infrastructure, build & integration, governance and  domain analysis.

On the same note, Wolfgang Keller, Partner at BusinessGlue Consulting, provided us recently with some advice to get started with SOA. He offers fours approaches:

Pilot project in IT department

Financing of the SOA through savings in the IT department

Powerful sponsor

Pilot project with real business value

Srikanth Inaganti and Sriram Aravamudan are stressing the need for key IT processes to be in place as they defined a comprehensive SOA Maturity model:

One must not forget the fact that people, technology and architecture alone will not take an enterprise through SOA journey successfully, unless they are supported by key processes and activities. A maturity model for SOA should therefore encompass both the effectiveness of the architecture (product) as well as the processes required to take it from the as-is state to the to-be state.

Sarah Hepner and Malhar Kamdar discussed the issue of acquiring SOA skills and provided some advice on balancing outsourcing, insourcing and re-skilling.

Building on their early successes with pilot projects, many companies are pursuing enterprisewide service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiatives. These longer-term, expansive projects demand personnel with proven SOA skills. Yet the challenge of acquiring SOA skills is more than just another skirmish in the larger war for IT talent.

Jeff notes that SOA initiatives often underestimate the need to perform domain analysis:

It surprises [him] how many organizations forget this [last] point. Domain analysis is typically performed by enterprise architects who have a strong background in process modeling and service design. They pick a domain area (Sales, Supply Chain, etc.) and perform Process Reengineering, Process Modeling, Service Identification, Service Analysis and Composite Application Requirements Gathering.

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   SOA in reality

   by matt tulum

   Nice article however you seemed to miss out some key factors within the text...
   
   What does SOA stand for is one of them? Sh*t out of Assets?
   I for one am sure myself and my team at Tulum Hotels will be using our own 'SOA' methodology to prepare for the oncoming financial year, however your 'big company' insight has been very useful! Thanks

   Reply

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