You would think that for many SOA evangelists and practitioners the current challenging business climate would be the perfect opportunity to walk the walk on the main promise of SOA – business agility. Agility is defined as: “Nimbleness in the face of unexpected obstacles”. Well, we certainly have a whole bunch of those at the moment.

Although the vendors are pushing this value proposition heavily at the moment, the take-up is still hampered by a lack of real business success stories. And, of course, lack of budget.

A few years ago there was fairly clear blue water between BPM and SOA in the minds of both users and vendors.  Each camp promoted significant benefits from their offerings and, although there was a recognised touch point between the two, each was happy to exist with or without the other.

Although SOA is hardly a new concept, very few organisations have yet developed and rolled out a complete Service Oriented Architecture.  There are many reasons for this, but I have found that in many cases there has not been a sound foundation built to ensure that the right architecture is used at the right time for the right problems.  Also, business cases for SOA have been notoriously difficult to construct and sell to the purse string holders.

As I mentioned in the last article, Selling SOA to the Business, it is important to gain buy-in from the stakeholders for your planned SOA initiatives. However, at some stage you will need to expose the business to the technology and demonstrate the specific value it will have to them. In parallel you will also want to get a good handle on what is actually possible to deliver as opposed to the hype you have been fed by the analysts.

(Or, Why Don’t They Get What A Service Is?)

In talking to many senior IT executives, whenever the topic of SOA is mentioned they invariable complain of two things. The first is that all the vendors are doing SOA – but all in different ways, making it difficult to mix and match. The second is that getting business buy-in to SOA from business managers is even harder than trying to wrestle their ‘Crackberries’ from them.

The problem is that without business buy-in, SOA cannot deliver its fabled benefits to the organisation – Agility, Growth, Innovation.