Informatica Enterprise Data Management

I am seeing a disconnect between many clients' 2008 plans for service-oriented architecture (SOA) and the expectations they are setting with the business groups that are funding them.

The good news is that people have been pervasive in getting sponsorship and funding for SOA projects based on anticipated business benefits. The bad news is that despite good technology, many IT projects fail when business group don't get what they think they were promised. It’s like the old saying “you can talk the talk, but can you walk the walk?”

The promise of SOA is to establish reusable services that can be deployed throughout the enterprise to deliver accelerated application implementation at lower risk and effort. Reusable business services reduce redundant or overlapping development efforts and increase IT productivity. They also enable applications that were previously siloed to exchange data and interoperate.
All those things are true, but SOA is infrastructure, not an application. With every wave of technology change people too often implement technology for technology’s sake. It's great to get the infrastructure in place, but if you convinced the business that there were going to be business benefits, then a shiny new infrastructure won't meet their expectations. That infrastructure is a canvas upon which you can paint business services and applications that are going to be of great value to the business.

So what should you do (deliver) in that new SOA initiative next year? Simple business value. And the area that is most likely to produce the business ROI is services that deliver data integration between and with applications. Too often I see the initial services to be basic data (access) services. That’s nice, but it's typically not what the business is lacking.

What the business needs is data gathered and transformed from across the enterprise. The data integration service might be delivered real-time to operation systems or served up for performance management analytics. Either way they need an integration service, not just an access service.

If you have an SOA initiative for next year make sure you have planned not only to deliver the infrastructure, but also integration services. That is the surest way to deliver a solid business ROI.