Sunday, January 29, 2006

Can IT vendors deliver on SOA?

2006 has seen SOA move solidly into the mainstream as a way to deliver IT, most organisations (Capgemini SOA Survey) are looking at it as a the way forwards for their IT organisation. Now whether most of these are really looking at SOA, or practising one of the main SOA antipatterns, is a mute point. The key element though is that organisations are looking to SOA to deliver a consistent IT infrastructure and concentrating on the importance of architecture.

The vendors however are continuing to concentrate on the technical elements, which as Miko pointed out at the recent Oracle EA club are the low cost and low impact challenges, while businesses and systems integrators are focused on the human and governance challenges of SOA. Previous IT waves have concentrated hugely on improvements in technologies, the difference being ERP which started to concentrate on how business operated. SOA, when done well is focused hugely on the actual delivery of IT and projects rather than on the technology in that delivery. Which means the skills are not around technical considerations but the human ones.

SOA-RM and the SOA Adoption Blueprints both consist mainly of technology delivers rather than vendors, who are concentrating more on things like WS-Transaction et al. So without a focus on IT delivery can vendors ever hope to deliver on SOA?

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