'Fifty' may be the magic number for SOA governance

I've talked plenty about JBOWS architectures (Just a Bunch of Web Services), which are essentially services that are point to point and have no cohesion in terms of governance, registry/repository, orchestration, process testing, or flow.

At what point should higher-level SOA qualities kick in? I've heard plenty of discussion, but it seems the general consensus is that if a company only has a few Web services, it simply may not yet require the trappings of SOA. Of course, it depends a lot on what those few services do -- a single service handling ERP transactions from 10,000 end users takes on a lot more urgency than 100 services each handling a few corporate lunchroom transactions.

Lorraine Lawson just surfaced a discussion on this very topic, and reports that there is a formula that can be applied to determine the threshold of when JBOWS crosses into the SOA realm. And when that formula is applied, 50 comes up as that magic number.

Lorraine quotes a recent podcast (link to MP3 file here) on the topic:

"Time and time again, SOA efforts fall into confusion once a company has several development teams and about 50 services built. That’s also the point where there are too many services for informal management, says Robert Meyer, the senior product marketing manager for TIBCO. "Once companies hit this number, they quickly can lose the benefits of SOA unless they take time out to set up SOA governance. 'The people who don’t put this in place can actually spend more than they would on traditional application development,' Meyer says.

Again, it depends a lot on the quality and scope of the services involved, but 50 seems like a good threshold to begin thinking about introducing SOA methodologies. From surveys I've seen, most organizations aren't there yet, but, make no mistake, they're rapidly approaching the Big Five-O.