SOA's Next Phase - ' Spread the Word '

1) Spread the Word

Technology executives must make it clear that an SOA implementation isn't a one-shot deal. "SOA is not something you deploy and then you're finished. It's a new approach toward software engineering," says Yefim Natis, a vice president at research firm Gartner in Stamford, Conn. He anticipates that all applications will be modernized or replaced by SOA, and that new purchased and in-house-developed apps will be based on the architecture. "The SOA discipline and practices are the permanent replacement for the now-prevailing monolithic [even if technically distributed] systems."

After SOA has been successfully deployed in one or two projects, information-technology managers must articulate the value of a service-based architecture to business executives and employees. By doing this, they can show senior executives, including people in finance, that a move to SOA is worth the money and effort—including demonstrating how SOA can help departments function more successfully and workers perform more productively.

Even within the I.T. department, proponents of SOA need to promote SOA. "Initial projects tend to be pretty informal and isolated, so part of the next step needs to be scaling up the effort, bringing more of the I.T. organization into the loop and educating them," says Ian Finley, research director at AMR Research. "This is an internal sales job about what the capabilities are, what the project was and why it worked well."

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