Another view: do we spend too much time trying to sell SOA to the business?

We expend plenty of bytes in this site repeating a mantra that also is echoed in conferences and analyst briefings across the globe: For SOA to work, get the business involved. Early if possible. The blanket criticism for the "failure" of SOA has been to blame IT for making it too much of an IT activity, and not a business thing.

'At the end of the day, SOA is a pure IT problem'

However, one practitioner begs to differ on this conventional wisdom. SOA Enterprise Architect Jean-Jacques Dubray, who has put SOA in place at a major financial institution, says we're actually spending way too much time worrying and trying to get the business interested in SOA. Businesspeople aren't the key stakeholders in SOA -- IT staff and developers are, he says. Perhaps its more important to spend the time and energy getting these people on board.

Dubray was reacting to a recent blog post by Loraine Lawson, who frequently discusses the requirements for better aligning SOA and integration with the business. Loraine said that an effective way to promote adoption of integration or SOA projects is to "publicize the results to the board.... brag about it constantly and loudly every chance you get""involve IT decision makers and brag about the results" -- which I agree with. However, Dubray said perhaps business managers aren't the people that need to be educated about or sold on the concept:

"My experience is that the key people that you have to focus all your energy on are the developers, architects, business analysts, QAs and operations. If they don't get SOA, you won't have much to brag about. Sure I understand why she is saying this, SOA and Integration may cost a lot of money and you can't always hide the deployment of SOA infrastructure components within projects, but at the end of the day this is a pure IT problem."

Dubray points out that while the business needs to care about solutions, SOA in and of itself is not a solution -- it's an architecture. "It is IT and IT's only responsibility to decide whether they want to do SOA and for what reasons. IMHO, we wasted years trying to convince the business to throw money at SOA and to a certain degree disappointed them when we missed the most critical success factor: get delivery and operations organizations knowledgeable and on board."

He then drives his point home thusly:

"If you want to fail your Service Oriented Architecture ignore delivery and operations and focus all your energy on 'business architecture,' go play golf with your CEO and CIO and get a big budget to buy expensive products."

Just to be clear, Dubray acknowledges that SOA needs to stay closely aligned with the business, and his first piece of advice is to create an SOA center of excellence. But his contention is that SOA is fundamentally owned by IT, and its care and feeding should remain within IT's domain.

Dubray says SOA is a "pure IT problem." But in this era of the online collaborative organization, when we rely on technology for every aspect of our business, are there really any "pure IT" problems?