RSSSOA: Just try it, you’ll like it
Or was that crack cocaine? I forget.
At any rate, if you can get past all the teapot tempests that have troubled the concept of Service Oriented Architectures recently and actually begin to implement it, there seems to be a pretty good chance you'll stick with it for the long term, according to Forrester's Randy Heffner speaking in this podcast interview with ZDNet's Joe McKendrick.
According to Heffner, Forrester's survey indicates that of all respondents who have begun implementing SOA initiatives, only 1% abandon them. While satisfaction with the implementations hovers around only 25%, enough value is seen in almost every case to continue with the projects.
This fits right in to the narrative established over the summer involving backlash against SOA as a silver bullet and a one-size-fits-all solution to enterprise architecture woes. As with most new buzzwords, SOA was clearly oversold by consultants and fans, and wasn't able to deliver everything they promised in the timeframes sponsors were looking for. At the same time, and again like many new buzzword-coded concepts, there is certainly promise and value in SOA, and most enterprises will find themselves moving toward implementing it to various levels in the future. Heffner points out that of the most successful group identified in the survey, most are treating SOA as a "business design concept" rather than a snazzy new technology. And that may be where both the backlash and the root of the solution to it lays; SOA was never a technology, which most techies are comfortable with, yet it came from the technology side of the shop, a place that many business leaders view with suspicion. Once CIOs can get the train turned around on what exactly SOA is and what it can offer, I think the concept has a bright, and even inevitable, future in the enterprise.
