Stop with the damn SOA technology

I came across a post talking about the challenges of SOA and Financial Silos which references an item about too much SOA technology and makes the good point that we can't expect the business to fund strategic IT and should concentrate on delivering against what the business wants.

I'm with that, especially as I don't think there is IT strategy but where I think this article misses the point is that it holds up its hands and says "okay then lets just to the techy stuff at the bottom" which really is just accepting that SOA is just EAI, and like in scrabble if you lay down those two you end up with the same score.

The real problem, which is referenced but then sort of glossed over, is that IT needs to be looking well away from the technology and away from the projects and doing two things. Firstly IT should be looking to get the investment to make changes by economising on those parts of the budget that they do control (i.e. support, development and infrastructure of existing systems) and Secondly IT should be looking to do the cheap things that will have the largest impact. This means organisational and governance changes and understanding what the business service architecture should be. The article (IMO) also makes the mistake of thinking that BPM is where the real end game is here, which it certainly isn't as BPM is just another execution choice for IT and not a different way of actually doing IT.

If you think "well we can't make any changes but at least we can use SOA technologies on this project, that will help won't it?" then you are deluding yourself.

Make the cheap changes first, then worry about the license costs.

Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture