Comparing Current Financial Crisis to SOA - Continued

I agree completely with Yogish's views as posted on "Comparing Current Financial Crisis to SOA" and his advice on treading light and having solid justification prior to undertaking SOA style projects.


A) An upfront investment has to be made in performing the right level of business process analysis and business architecture to pick the right SOA service candidates.


B) One should not attempt embarking on SOA with a highly visible project, as these types of projects operate under unwarranted pressure for delivery and with little patience for "architectural constructs" SOA or otherwise!!


C) Any project that is a high return type process with established KPIs and benchmarks is a good candidate for first time SOA implementations. Here gains are measurable (in the form of cost avoidance, cost reduction etc.) and can be directly tied to SOA-enabling these operational processes.

D) One has to invest in marketing the success of these projects and the services that were responsible for these quantifiable returns delivered by following SOA principles. Advertising the benefits of SOA style services with the benefits rendered by these projects help the business to relate to the abstract constructs such as SOA and so offer a better chance for service adoption. Also, advertising these business services that deliver efficiencies can be shown to offer speed to market gains that can be used for upcoming projects by encouraging reuse.

E) As always one should not assume technology will be the magic bullet. An assessment has to be made to understand if all components of the process/ business capability have to be refactored into services. One has to be open to leveraging legacy assets to reduce risk even if all that can be achieved is establishing a document based interaction or a mediated invocation of the legacy system.

Your feedback is invaluable.
Thank you!!
Surekha -

Comparing current financial crisis to SOA

Comparing the current financial crisis with SOA was one of the topics we briefly discussed at the Community of Practice working group of the SOA Consortium. Following are some of my thoughts on this topic:

• The current financial crisis is based on a flawed foundation - the sub-prime mortgages
• Investment bankers and mortgage companies composed new and complex derivatives and resold them all across the globe - all in the name of new and investment models
• Most of the executives of the involved companies as well as government agencies reviewed some of the aspect of the new world and based on what they knew then - thought it was all OK.
• No one seriously took time to review the potential business risk and take corrective action before it was too late
• The investments were so interdependent which made it impossible to understand the implications or the impact of letting one service fail. Example: The is no rational on why Lehman Brother was allowed to fail? and why AIG was rescued?

...and we see the result today. Doesn't this sound familiar?

Following are my recommendation on how to make sure that our SOA adoption does not take the same path (some will).

• Make sure that all SOA adoption is based on sound business and technical foundation. Adopt and make sure to document the business architecture (design) and develop a technology road map (architecture) to meet these goals.
• Do not hype and push rapid adoption without thinking through the life cycle .
• Ensure that there is proper governance around your SOA Adoption - over communicate and be a bit more conservative on the risks.
• It is not necessary to adopt SOA for all implementations - I would rather then to recommend that one makes sure that some of critical business capabilities (applications) are provided (build) using the traditional model.
• Do not depend on services that are more than two level deeper (Reference: SOA Theorem #4: Service Hierarchy should not exceed more than three levels ). This is to ensure that you understand each of the services and their performance which will help you take corrective action, if required.

These are just some of my initial thoughts and as usual please do feel free to drop me line with your comments and/or feedback.

- Yogish