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Planning and Implementing SOA www.butlergroup.com The Datamonitor survey already mentioned indicated that a lack of technical in-house expertise (27%) is the main reason for not adopting SOA. This factor was particularly significant as a barrier to deployment in the Public Sector and Manufacturing vertical markets. However, there are a number of other reasons why SOA is not seeing a wider uptake, with security concerns a significant contributor. For many end users (and rather more so, the IT department that is tasked with ensuring security), the idea of having their applications exposed as services to all comers on the Web signals increased vulnerability. There is a concern that the flexibility of SOA may come at the expense of reduced security. The Evans Data survey also found that authentication of on-line identities is the greatest security challenge to Web services, with one in four respondents saying that the inability to confirm the identities of on-line users and services is the biggest problem. Whilst there are many security initiatives under way, gaining better understanding of the issues and how they may be overcome (for example, by supporting encryption once messages travel outside firewalls) will help. A basic lack of awareness is also limiting adoption; the Datamonitor survey showed that 13% of the respondents had not heard about SOA, whilst another 17% could see no need for SOA, or had not looked at SOA yet. This was most prevalent in those verticals with low adoption rates, in particular the Manufacturing sector. The Evans Data survey highlighted another important issue – 25% of respondents stated that the leading problem in implementation of Web services was either a lack of industry standards or changes in standards, a 67% increase from the previous survey on this issue. Certainly, standards around SOA are still maturing, and it is interesting to see that this is seen as a barrier to adoption. Enterprises expect cost savings to come from SOA deployment, though these will be in the long term. In the Datamonitor survey, only 5% of the surveyed enterprises saw cost issues as a reason for not adopting SOA. The majority (67%) of the surveyed organisations that are adopting SOA do not expect their overall IT spending to increase as a result. As SOA impacts all areas of an enterprise’s IT structure (and therefore its spending), it also suggests that enterprises believe that SOA will help them to save costs. Implementing SOA certainly requires investment in its early stages, in areas such as planning, setting up a roadmap, assessment of business processes, and re-design of the IT structure. One of the main concerns is that Implementing SOA certainly requires investment in its early stages, in areas such as planning, setting up a roadmap, assessment of business processes, and re-design of the IT structure. new infrastructure and new ways of working will be needed to make SOA work. This implies that pilot and early adopter projects will have a net cost to the organisation, and will therefore require very careful justification. Converting to SOA is a fundamental change that will require the restructuring of many existing applications, in order to use the available resources in an optimal way. Potential cost savings will drive the adoption of SOA. If one can reuse services that have already been built, less time and money is required when developing new applications, driving costs down by eliminating duplicate systems. However, where many of the benefits are likely to be realised most quickly are where new projects allow access to new markets, by enabling loosely-coupled yet automated interactions to existing systems. As well as infrastructure, an area that is likely to require greater spending is IT services – in part, with technology vendors but also with services providers that have already assisted in successful SOA implementations. Learning from others’ success is a major benefit to the ‘second wave’ of adopters – as is understanding where projects have gone astray. A piece of valuable insight from the Quocirca survey showed that those survey respondents who had gone fully down the SOA route saw major benefits for their organisations. These organisations are more competitive, due to the flexibility of their optimised environments. Often it is new functionality that is being implemented in a service-oriented manner, although there is also an element of re-architecting existing infrastructure to be more service oriented. 6 Section 1: SOA Deployment December 2006
www.butlergroup.com Planning and Implementing SOA SOA ROADMAP CATALYST SOA is not something that will happen overnight. It is much more likely that an organisation will take a number of years to achieve a true SOA. Understanding this, and planning how the organisation will move towards that goal will be facilitated by the creation of an organisational-specific roadmap that helps it understand where it is now, and where it needs to work next in order to best achieve the goal. SUMMARY Planning a strategy across several domains provides visibility. SOA may not be the appropriate architectural model for all systems. The move to SOA will take many years for the majority of organisations. Careful strategy can help to future-proof SOA developments. ANALYSIS With the level of hype around SOA, one could be forgiven for thinking that it is a concept that organisations should be able to ‘do’ rapidly and move on. However, evidence indicates that a more realistic timescale for SOA is at least five years from the start – and probably significantly longer. The challenges of SOA, compounded with the lack of genuine understanding, mean that this could even be quite optimistic – the changes required to the way organisations work may mean that early attempts do not deliver the expected benefits, unless carefully managed and controlled. Planning a strategy across several domains provides visibility. Successful SOA will require that all areas of an organisation need to understand the impact of SOA, and what it is likely to do for them. In order to achieve the goal, as with setting any organisational change target, understanding the different areas that need to be involved, and setting objectives for each area at each Successful SOA is about the process of change – understanding how it may affect the organisation and what the organisation is aiming for. phase looking forward will be a valuable exercise. Successful SOA is about the process of change – understanding how it may affect the organisation and what the organisation is aiming for. SOA requires highly cross-organisational focus – it is about getting the organisation to come out of its departmental ‘silos’, and developing an awareness across the organisation. The rise of shared services is a business-centric start for this process – understanding that a particular competency can be provided as a service to other areas of the organisation. In some respects, the business is already ahead of IT here! Often viewed as a type of maturity model, the objective of defining a high-level roadmap is to ensure that progress is made in each of the main areas before moving on to the next phase. If any of the individual areas has not progressed, it is likely that any move to SOA will be less effective than anticipated. Each organisation should develop its own roadmap as part of the planning process, but may be guided by the model we provide here as Figure 8.2.1. A number of vendors have developed maturity models for SOA (including Amberpoint, BEA Systems, IBM, Sonic Software, and Systinet (now Mercury)). However, a maturity model would probably align best with an independent body like the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), which has developed the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI). The Butler Group SOA Roadmap has been formed by reference to several of these models, together with discussions with early adopters and systems integrators. December 2006 Section 1: SOA Deployment 7
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