Does cloud add more silos to our over-siloed enterprises?

I just had the opportunity to moderate a panel with Miko Matsumura and John Favazza, in a rousing ebizQ roundtable discussion on trends on SOA governance. Miko pointed to the complexity of enterprises, noting the challenges of bringing the hopelessly fragmented parties within larger organizations into alignment. This is one of the objectives of good governance.

Miko points out that size matters when it comes to clouds as well. Especially when it comes to enterprise software. (Miko reminds us that the word “Enterprise” in the phrase “Enterprise Software” has come to mean "software that sucks.")

Cloud gets particularly challenging when the organization grows, and is has fragmented into factions, silos, and niches. Adding cloud means more complexity, "yet another technology silo to maintain, integrate, secure and govern," he says.  A systematic enabling architecture is required to introduce cloud across the multiple parts of an enterprise.

One of the issues with many SOA efforts to date is that many people threw Web services out across their domains, hoping they will eventually gel into service oriented architecture.  When you have different divisions or departments subscribing to their own choices of cloud services, the complexity grows.