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SOA’s Next Act: Overcoming IT's Service-Oriented Architecture Fatigue

Reports of SOA’s demise have been somewhat exaggerated, according to the 270 business technology professionals InformationWeek Analytics surveyed for this State of SOA report. But that’s not to say there isn’t trouble in SOA-ville: Only 23% of respondents say that their organizations have deployed a SOA, and just 7% of those report that the resulting systems are available for external use. Twenty-nine percent are experimenting or in development, while 31% have no plans. Purported benefits of SOA, such as increased flexibility and business agility, reduced costs, and improved time to market, were not major factors speeding increased adoption. The percentage of overall software reuse within organizations rose by just 7% after initiating a SOA project, from 32% to 39%.

SOA governance is, tragically, DOA.

Still, enterprise IT groups rarely turn on a dime, and they don’t lightly abandon investments and strategic decisions. When asked if their SOA projects have been successful in affecting a positive business impact, respondents were reluctant to vary much from the medium “as expected.” Both positive and negative extremes (“more successful” and “less successful”) scored nearly identical low scores. One interpretation: It’s human nature not to admit mistakes, so these readers are reluctant to cede defeat. But we believe—and this take is supported by survey results and our discussions with a wide range of stakeholders—that those companies that are moving forward with SOA implementations, instead of abandoning ship, are taking the path of least resistance; in essence, building their SOAs on the Web, using Internet-delivered APIs and more agile REST-based Web services as a simpler alternative to heavyweight SOA Web services.

We also found that SOAs are generally implemented to address integration issues, as with packaged applications and mainframes, rather than in an effort to streamline bloat within an organization’s application portfolio. The difficulty of re-engineering existing apps is most often cited as the greatest SOA challenge.

For this InformationWeek Analytics report, we’ll use the OASIS SOA Technical Committee’s definition of SOA as “an architectural paradigm and discipline that may be used to build infrastructures enabling those with needs (consumers) and those with capabilities (providers) to interact via services across disparate domains of technology and ownership.” We’ll see whether respondents have realized such SOA goals as flexibility, reusability, and interoperability, and look at how businesses are measuring success against the larger and timelier objective of reducing costs in the current economic climate.

Finally, we’ll explore some paths for moving SOA processes forward, gleaned from corporate decision-makers who have experience evaluating, testing, developing, or deploying real-world SOA applications, including a deep-dive profile of an ongoing SOA project built by a Web architecture team at measurement products supplier National Instruments, which had an initially successful deployment but must now fight for money and resources with other groups using the SOA. (490209)

Survey Name: InformationWeek Analytics State Of SOA Survey
Survey Date: January 2009
Region: North America
Number of Respondents: 270