Measuring SOA success

Joe McKendrick, ZDNet blogger and all-around SOA expert, reported on a simple and interesting way to evaluate the success of SOA (service-oriented architecture) implementations. Joe says that a decrease in an organization's IT backlog can be used as a "metric to judge the efficiency and ROI of the SOA implementation."

I like this metric because it measures results rather than process. All too often, measures of IT success examine whether process milestones, rather than business results, have been achieved. This simple equation is nice because it's transparent, measurable, real, and business-oriented. Gotta love it.