The Real Value of SOA

The events, which took place in three cities across the U.S., were aimed at getting feedback from IT leaders about the steps the consortium plans to take to reach its stated goal of having 75% of Global 1000 companies self-identify their organizations as SOA success stories. It expects to release the details of these deliverables at its next SOA Consortium meeting, which will take place at the end of March.

Don’t expect to find SOAP or other web services standards mentioned as key points of its plans. Though managed by the Object Management Group (OMG) standards organization, the SOA Consortium is steering clear of the nitty-gritty technology that lets organizations build these architectures.

Instead, it’s acting as an advocacy group to help IT and business leadership understand how to make changes that can lead to business agility. Specifically, it wants to help them move to structuring their business by services — that is, understanding what services comprise the business, and become more efficient at reusing them to support new initiatives somewhere else in the company — as well as create better relationships between enterprise architects with line-of-business project managers.

It's Not About Web Services

“The difficult part is being able to recognize, catalogue and make more efficient the business services, and being able to explain to the line of business how to take advantage of that,” says consortium executive director Richard Soley, who also is chairman and CEO of OMG.

Those business services may be automated or they may be parts of human workflow, but either way, recognizing those processes exist somewhere within the organization and capturing them is good for business functionality.

The recent round of CIO Summits has made it clear, though, that IT leadership itself has certain perceptions of SOA that may not help get the message across to the business units.

“When you get IT folks together to discuss SOA, the conversation dwindles into web services. We say that’s not what it’s about,” says Soley.