Gartner Podcast: SOA Lessons Learned From the Trenches
Gartner came out with a good podcast of one of their sessions from the Gartner Enterprise Architecture Summit. It is a very informative panel discussion about “Lessons Learned From the Trenches” with SOA/Enterprise Architecture. Anyone who is an Enterprise Architect or Technology/Business Executive embracing the change and possibilities of SOA in their organization will want to give it a listen. Chances are very good you’ll be vigorously nodding your head and maybe even feeling a little bit better about yourself knowing you are not alone in dealing with these problems.
Much of the conversation is about how to drive SOA adoption (it appears relying on developers to browse a repository is not working), how to measure cost benefits and savings to an organization (hint: measure your service reuse) and how they approach funding services which may not have an exact business advocate and therefore pocketbook to work against.
The last piece comes up all the time in organizations implementing a service oriented architecture. There are many business areas that would benefit from a high level “business service” which would result from the orchestration through externalized business logic (BPM/BPEL) of lower level “technology services”. Yet, if asked who would fund these lower level technology services so that the business services can emerge, the money dries up. Many take on the model of “first to need, first to pay” but that only works when the technology services and service orchestration aren’t that expensive. It’s hard to get project specific business users to fund enterprise wide services for the “greater good”. It’s something that has yet to be solved.
Here is the link.
