Friday, April 15, 2005

SOA: Business Impact Strategy

A major shift has been occurring over the last few months in the SOA adoption curve. "Business people" are now being tasked to understand the strategic business impact of SOA/Web Services in their organization. This is a significant deviation from the last set of strategy calls around "strategic SOA implementation".

Many organizations have completed the first stage of maturity. That is, they have a SOA strategy in place, a SOA methodology, a reference model, candidate architectures and core infrastructure components (registry, repository, SOAP routers & firewalls, pipe & filter mediation, service bus, SOA EII, metadata compliance, testing suites, SOAP-to-Legacy adaptors, specialized "service servers", etc.) Typically, a core team has been trained but a larger training plan is available. Again - this is in "leading organizations" - not the majority!

These leading I.T. organizations are now giving the business units the go-forward nod, indicating that they have their act together and passing the baton to the business units to make the next move. Much like we saw in late 90's around the Web, business managers are looking at the capabilities of the technology, studying the disruptions and applying it to their domain.

I'm starting to see SOA patterns of disruption emerge - but it is still early. Very exciting - more to come...

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