SOA - Another Technical Solution with the same issues

IT organizations and specialists come up with new buzz words and three letter acronyms all the time. One of the current ones is SOA - Service Oriented Architecture. At this time, it isn't of interest to small businesses, but the issues raised follow the same pattern that can be found in all IT related projects.

A recent article talks about ten mistakes that are made with SOA projects:

1. Failure to explain SOA's business value.
2. Underestimating the impact of organizational change.
3. Lack of strong Executive sponsorship.
4. Attempting to do SOA on the cheap.
5. No SOA skills on staff.
6. Poor project management.
7. Viewing SOA as a project instead of an architecture.
8. Underestimating the complexity of SOA.
9. Failure to implement and adhere to SOA Governance.
10. Letting the vendor drive the Architecture.

These issues are true for SOA, but they are also true for any IT project. SOA is new to most IT organizations. In the same way, new business software is new to a small business. Change the acronym to anything else, and you will have the same issues. In the past 30 years, significant effort has been expended by IT organizations to solve the overall problems. The failure rate is still very high. Even worse than absolute failure is that those organizations that feel that they have succeeded, do not get as much value from the implementation as they could.

As the article explains, the biggest issues relate to people and process. This is true of all technical projects. If these issues are not addressed, your chance of failure is high.

The full article can be found at: http://www.cio.com.au/article/253821/10_mistakes_cause_soa_fail?pp=6