Let market forces drive SOA adoption

A report out of ComputerWeekly notes that in its latest survey of 100 top IT executives, 77% now "believe it is getting easier to demonstrate the business value of IT" -- up from 66% in February.

Statistical margin of error (10%) aside, what happened over the last five months to make CIOs more bullish on SOA value?

The answer may be found in the number of IT executives systematically measuring the business benefits of IT in general -- ComputerWeekly notes that the recent survey found that 54% were measuring IT value, up from 42% in November 2006.

The lesson here is that SOA's value is only realized when the metrics and measurements are put in place. Without measurement, no one knows what exactly SOA is delivering to the business. It could be doubling profit margins -- but who would know?

So what's changed from late 2006/early 2007? Are businesses suddenly getting metrics savvy? If so, what metrics are being measured? What's appropriate for SOA success measurement?

The most common metric so far is time saved in application development. This helps make the case for SOA in terms of cost cutting, but how do you capture metrics that show increased business agility? Yes, increased profits are the ultimate metric, but how do you parse through that to show what role SOA played?

Dave Linthicum has been working on some formulas for SOA ROI, and has come up with some ways to capture increased business agility thanks to SOA. He talks about "the degree of change over time" (the number of times over a particular period that the business reinvents itself to adapt to a market; "the ability to adapt to change" (a number that states the company's ability to react to the need for change over time; and "the relative value of change" (the amount of money made as a direct result of changing the business).

ComputerWorld suggests a fairly straightforward approach to assessing SOA and IT value to the business -- the tried-and-true IT chargeback arrangement. Offer SOA as if it were from a standalone business. The article quotes Paul Butler, IT services director at Rolls-Royce, who observes that "charging back is also about trying to change the perception of IT from "Being just an overhead or a cost center, to being perceived as a valuable contributor to the business. If people buy, they are buying because they believe what they purchase has value, otherwise they would ot be buying it, and that has an important impact on how IT as a whole s valued."

In this blogsite, I have suggested that business units should be able to subscribe to SOA services, just as they would subscribe to Software as a Service, just as they would go outside the firewall to subscribe to Salesforce.com services. SaaS is rapidly becoming a mode of thinking that business users are adopting. SOA also enables IT departments to offer services to groups outside their enterprise. If the market -- both internally as well as externally -- will bear the costs of subscribing to these services, would this not be the most compelling measurement of the value of SOA?

The ComputerWorld survey also notes that SOA investment is up. "Full deployments across organizations increased to four percent of those surveyed in May, up from one percent in April. Meanwhile, departmental deployments increased from 14% to 17% over the same period."

Four percent SOA deployments sound low, but such a finding is refreshingly candid, not driven by the everyone-is-doing-it hype we hear. SOA is not something organizations roll out overnight, or within months. It takes time.