Just when I thought this topic was dead, I ran into this article by Rich Seeley that does a great job in highlighting the issues, and the defense of SOA as some budgets become tight. "SearchSOA.com did its own survey of thought leaders who follow service-oriented architecture to see how they thought an economic downturn would impact SOA planning and implementation. Specifically, we asked this question: What will Just when I thought this topic was dead, I ran into this article by Rich Seeley that does a great job in highlighting the issues, and the defense of SOA as some budgets become tight. “SearchSOA.com did its own survey of thought leaders who follow service-oriented architecture to see how they thought an economic downturn would impact SOA planning and implementation. Specifically, we asked this question: What will SOA need to achieve in an economic downturn to prove it deserves its agile-business, cost-savings hype?” Neil Ward-Dutton, research director, Macehiter Ward-Dutton, provides the best advice. Naming 3 key things that companies can do to defend SOA. “First: transform your approach to software delivery incrementally, focusing initially on one or two areas where you know that change is going to happen and keep happening. Use SOA to minimize the future cost of change in one or two high-profile areas like this and you’ll demonstrate how IT can minimize costs and still support ongoing innovation. Second: set up a small “center of excellence” to lead these projects and develop skills and helping educate everyone else. Third: get your center of excellence to really collaborate with the business – to learn about the most suitable problems to tackle; to help measure the impact of the shift to SOA and to turn them into champions for further transformation.” And, some advice from myself. “SOA always needs to prove its value and during times of economic uncertainly, where capital budgets are contracting, the best approach is to focus on short term objectives that are directly related to the generation or revenue. This does not replace a long term SOA strategy, which is very important, it’s just a way to provide leadership with proof points to justify the continued investment. Perhaps the service enablement of the existing legacy systems to provide better interfaces for trading partners or the ability to abstract processes/services into configurable domains, thus allowing processes to change without a great deal of latency and cost. The number and types of high-value projects should be obvious. In essence, prove that the investment in SOA should increase during a downturn, considering that the ROI is very high.” Okay, things are getting tight, and SOA is going to need some defending. Hopefully I’ve armed you with some key issues to consider. Software Development