Barriers to SOA entry 

Often it’s human habit — not technical difficulty — that slows the adoption of a promising new technology. Such is the case with SOA (service-oriented architecture), where issues of governance pose significant obstacles.

To see why, says BEA Systems CTO Mark Carges, you only have to consider the traditional way in which IT applications were built. “Each application existed in its own silo, with its own database, and talked mainly to the company’s own employees,” Carges says.

Today, he points out, that’s no longer good enough. Applications are written so that their functionality is available to outside users, generally via a Web service. Databases are shared. And apps usually spend much more time talking to one another, both within and between companies, than they do dealing with people. Given those challenges, you might think that the transition to SOA — the IT design philosophy that encourages such sharing — would be easy.

Not so, unfortunately, and the reason comes back to those same human beings. Consider what happens when some piece of business functionality, such as a consumer credit check, is shared across a large financial institution. Originally, this functionality might have been available only to those in the consumer loan department, and it was tailored to their needs. Under SOA, however, it is exposed for the use of people and apps all across the company.

“So long as the functionality stayed in one silo,” Carges says, “everyone understood who controlled and funded it. But once you share it, then who pays for it, who modifies it, and who makes sure it never goes down?”

Such issues have led some companies to adopt what amount to SLAs between departments or to set up complicated internal “tax” and cross-charge systems. And it’s thanks to such practices, Carges says, that “we no longer have to explain to potential customers what SOA is all about; we only have to talk about the practical steps to getting started — like how to break down the silos.”

Overcoming such obstacles will be a key topic at InfoWorld’s upcoming SOA Executive Forums, to be held May 5 in San Jose, Calif., and May 17 in New York (and which, full disclosure, are partly sponsored by BEA). These events carry the theme of enabling business agility and will feature separate tracks for technologists and businesspeople. You can register at infoworld.com/events.

One more item: Monday, Feb. 14, marks the extended deadline date for nominations to InfoWorld’s annual list of the top 25 CTOs, which will be published in the April 11 issue. So if you know of a superstar IT executive who created a new tech-driven profit center, spearheaded a new technology, or achieved any other notable goal, please alert us at infoworld.com/awards.