Ponder this: how many businesspeople are begging for SOA?

Jack van Hoof has a way of cutting right to the chase, and in a recent post, put the entire SOA-as-IT-and-business-aligner vision in it's proper perspective:

"Up till now, at this very moment in time, I didn't meet one single business manager who begged me to please deliver him an SOA-based solution."

The bottom line, as Jack points out, is that businesspeople don't want or care about service-oriented architecture. They want answers and fixes to their problems. They want relief to their pain. They want financial success with their projects. "Our businesspeople don't want SOA's, they want flexible and cheap solutions. And they want IT not to be a big hurdle when they change the way they happen to do things. But they definitely did not ask me for an SOA."

Okay, SOA is still an IT thing, right? Jack has observed, however, that SOA has been greatly misconstrued within IT circles as well:

"Developers - in general - don't get the clue of SOA. The marketeers of most software companies evangelize their ability to build service oriented systems. But the people who really have to deal with the details are not educated to get a grip on the practical use of the principles of autonomous business functions, loose coupling and asynchronous design. They are trained to use the modelling tools of Websphere, Sonic and Tibco, but SOA is not their mindset."

This validates recent conclusions from Saugatuck Technology, that SOA adoption has been slowed to a crawl, in large part because it has mainly been about tools, not the concept.

Saugatuck predicts a long timeline for SOA adoption, and Jack van Hoof agrees. Jack predicts that it will take at least 10 years "before SOA becomes mainstream and common sense to all of us."

It's going to take a lot of education and evangelizing. Here are some of the organizational issues blocking effective SOA adoption:

• IT departments are resisting SOA because they're threatened by it.
• Also, IT departments simply aren't equipped to move SOA forward.
• Some CTOs are not enamored, as of yet, by SOA.
• The financial community doesn't get SOA.
• Many IT professionals/architects aren't ready with the necessary skills for SOA.
• The enterprise won't be seeing SOA any time soon.

Of course, others are far more positive about the uptake of SOA. IBM says SOA is here and now, and that the approach has advanced by light years over the past three years. The SOA Consortium, which includes both large end-user enterprises and vendors among its members, has set a goal of successful SOA deployments in at least 75% of the largest companies and 50% of midsize companies within the next three years.

Talk about mixed messages. Is SOA being oversold, or not talked about enough? Is it the most revolutionary force to transform organizations since the invention of paper, or is it a maelstrom of hype and hope that nobody can quite get? The answer probably lies somewhere in between.

The problems may lie in setting expectations for SOA too high. In many cases, failure is regarded as the inability to achieve the business transformation, buy-in, and all that agility that SOA proponents and vendors had promised. IT can only do so much; it's up to the rest of the business to help realize the loftier promises of SOA. And, as I've said before in this blogsite, many organizations are too hidebound to accept or support the transformations in corporate culture that are part of SOA — even though these are the organizations that need SOA the most.

SOA is long term, in that it delivers benefits in a step-by-step fashion, starting with the smaller, nitty-gritty integration projects. Then, there are efforts to integrate business partner processes. Finally, after some time with this kind of work, the business can start to look at SOA as a catalyst for greater transformation. The business will eventually start to see the effects.

However, don't expect businesspeople to be asking for SOA anytime soon.