Thursday 4 October 2012

What is Service Oriented Architecture - Cost

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is great isn't it? Chaos becomes order. Services are available for everybody to reuse. Costs are lowered. The business is truly agile. Shareholders are smiling.

Ah, but its gonna cost you!

Here are some of the items you will need.

  • One big expensive Enterprise Service Bus for all your infrastructural needs.
  • Many application servers for those newly built services.
  • Lots of training and consultancy from the "experts".
  • EAI adapters for those troublesome legacy systems.
  • One pilot project, probably of neglible business benefit.
  • One Enterprise Architecture function to help with your systems governance.
  • One SOA Center of Excellence.
  • One agile software development function with well defined, measurable and repeatable processes
  • One sophisticated service management organisation capable of operating services as enterprise assets.
  • One patient business community as all this gets set up and they foot the bill.
  • One adaptive business community who will have to mend their tactical ways and start thinking of the greater good.
  • One understanding business community who will appreciate that their tactical requirements might need to be subordinated to more general and hence reusable requirements of the enterprise.
  • One adaptive technical community who will be willing to mend their ways and start reusing rather than reinventing.
  • One persuasive business case, which may be a challenge since chances are that the organisation will not be very good on the metrics front so providing a much needed concrete ROI is going to be a challenge.
Ah, but it will be a thing of beauty for all to see. :)

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