SOA Value Realization - Fact or Fiction?

Adoption of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) caught momentum several years ago in the IT industry. With organizations increasingly investing in technology, governance process and delivery aspects of SOA, the overall maturity levels have increased over the years. According to Gartner, organization’s spending on application integration is predicted to increase by 33% by the year 2016¹, however, the million-dollar question is - have these huge investments in SOA resulted in proportionate gains and benefits for organizations?

Wipro recently conducted a technology survey and analyzed the current trends and practices of various organizations in the SOA and Integration landscape so as to understand the correlation of their investments to value realization. The findings indicates that 40% of the organizations surveyed fall in the “High SOA Maturity” cluster signifying the fact that SOA is not just a white elephant²

SOA Value Realization - Fact or Fiction?

While the above figure kind of vindicates the “what you sow is what you reap” philosophy, the question is - what have organizations done right that has made them perform significantly better than their peers in their SOA journey? Here are some findings from our survey:

Ownership and funding model from business stakeholders is a key characteristic of successful SOA initiative
Emphasis on a shared service model, instead of LoB driven integration, is a key success factor
Engagements with effective central governance and/or CoE organizations are twice more likely to realize their objectives than others
Continuous integration aspects such as automated deployment and testing are key contributors to efficient delivery and cost reduction

There remain instances wherein SOA adoption has not provided the expected benefits, which is primarily because of the challenges with regard to integration, governance, ownership, adoption, and skilled resources, depicted below.

Based on the current trends and initiatives as well as its impact on the value realization observed in high and low SOA maturity organizations, our key recommendations and best practices for NextGen SOA are:

A 'Pragmatic' integration capability towards multi-channel programs, and a roadmap towards the target state
Governance & technology refresh should be recommended at large engagements faring low on value realization.
Delivery automation is an opportunity than can be piloted at small engagements, and matured into an organizational asset
Scope of open source adoption in low complexity engagements which can be combined with delivery automation to make an efficient and cost-effective solution

A detailed analysis of the report comprising of several interesting data points related to current and future trends across business domains and a deep-dive into the recommendations provided above is available here.

About the Author

Hitarshi Buch has 17 years of IT experience in architecture, consulting, design and implementation using API, SOA, BPM and Java/J2EE technologies. He has experience in IT transformation & modernization initiatives and has provided enterprise-wide SOA-based solutions. Hitarshi is currently working as a Senior Architect in Service Transformation at Wipro Technologies and is part of Blockchain practice. He is responsible for Blockchain CoE activities and supporting client engagements.

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