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Service-oriented Architecture—Savior or Nemesis?
Services Oriented is also known as :
Service Oriented Activities,
Service Oriented Applications,
Service Oriented Architect,
Service Oriented Attitude,
Service Oriented Businesses,
Service Oriented Communication,
Service Oriented Companies,
Service Oriented Data Architecture,
Service Oriented Definition,
Service Oriented Development,
Service Oriented Device Architecture,
Service Oriented Enterprise Architecture,
Service Oriented Enterprises,
Service Oriented Framework,
Service Oriented Individual,
Service Oriented Industries,
Service Oriented Marketing,
Service Oriented Middleware,
Service Oriented Organizations,
Service Oriented Process,
Service Oriented Project,
Service Oriented Sales,
Service Oriented Society,
Service Oriented Solutions,
Service Oriented Storage,
Service Oriented Strategy,
Service Oriented Submission,
Service Oriented Systems,
Service Oriented Technology,
Service Oriented Website,
Service Oriented Work,
Services Oriented Data,
Service Oriented Architecture,
Service Oriented Architecture Advantages,
Service Oriented Architecture Application,
Service Oriented Architecture Basics,
Service Oriented Architecture Benefits,
Service Oriented Architecture Best Practices,
Service Oriented Architecture Cost,
Service Oriented Architecture Demystified,
Service Oriented Architecture Examples,
Service Oriented Architecture Integration,
Service Oriented Architecture Net.
Introduction
The hype around SOA is tremendous—it will revolutionize IT, make life easier,
streamline business, and provide untold flexibility and responsiveness.
In reality, of course, it is not quite that easy, especially when you already have
layers of legacy technical architecture, a high maintenance and support burden,
and rabid business clients demanding new solutions now. So, how do you
realize the potential of SOA without raising expectations so high that they will
come back to bite you? Which issues do you need to address first? And, what is
a realistic timeline and approach?
“SOA has the potential to
make IT the hero or the
villain, depending on how
SOA is communicated and
implemented within
their organizations.”
—Damian Smith,
Hitachi Consulting
“Faster, Faster, Faster!”
Over the last 20 years the pace of business has changed: it has gotten faster.
Things that used to take days or weeks now take minutes or seconds. Products
that used to sell for years or even decades are
now obsolete in just two or three years.
This change is not limited to electronic or
technology products. The average product
lifespan for toys, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals,
and even food items has dropped from 15 or
20 years in the 1950s and 1960s to two to five
years today. Even the average life of an S&P
500 company has dropped from 65 years in the
1930s to 20 years in the 1990s.
The end-result of this increase is that business
is being forced to react to change far more
frequently as the pressure to keep up with the
market, competitors, and customer demands
grows more and more intense. That pressure
to be responsive and handle rapid change is
being passed directly on to IT departments.
Business clients are demanding faster, better,
more flexible systems, while at the same time
complaining about the rising cost of IT.
Layer Cake Architecture
Unfortunately, in most large organizations, it is impossible for IT to keep up.
Decades of investment in IT have left many with a layer cake architecture where
solutions have been created by adding layers of new technology on top of older
layers of technology. At the time, this seemed like a great idea: leveraging
existing investments, avoiding reinvention of the wheel, and not fixing what was
not broken. However, the problem now is that changing a system that could
potentially consist of anywhere between four and seven layers of mainframe,
mini, client server, ERP, N-tier, web, portal, and integration technology is
a nightmare.
Also, because the foundational layers of legacy solutions still need to be
supported, maintenance and support burden has been increasing with each new
layer added. Many organizations’ ‘lights on’ costs now consume more than half
of their IT budgets. Some are in a death spiral where their lights on costs are so
high that they no longer have enough free IT budget to make any significant
changes or investments. All they can afford now are band-aid solutions, which,
of course, increase the lights on costs even more.
The IT Catch 22
CIO’s and IT departments are in a Catch 22. In order to become more
responsive, more cost effective, and more flexible; IT must first become less
responsive, more expensive, and less flexible.
To deliver faster, better, cheaper solutions and to be more
responsive to business change, IT must first clear out its
layer cake architecture. In the next five to 10 years, the
majority of people who have the skills and experience to
maintain the bottom layers will be retiring, leaving behind an
expensive ticking time bomb. Wholesale replacement and
retirement of legacy solutions are now not only preferable—
they are critical.
But even if a CIO could get the organization to buy off on the
potentially massive investment necessary to replace its
legacy systems, with what should they be replaced? There is
no point in replacing them with new solutions that will be
inflexible or expensive or both.
Enter Service Oriented Architecture—
IT Savior
According to the hype, the savior to IT’s dilemma is Service
Oriented Architecture, or SOA. According to the analysts, the
press, the software companies, and the consultants, SOA
will solve all IT problems. Here are just a few recent press
and analyst quotes:
–CIO Magazine: “SOAs make it easier to integrate the
‘everything but the kitchen sink’ IT environments found in
most companies… it can lead to a better dialogue between
the CIO and line-of-business execs by forcing IT workers to
think in terms of business—not technical—architectures.”
–ZapThink: “SOA provides benefits in four basic categories: reducing integration
expense, increasing asset reuse, increasing business agility, and reduction of
business risk.”
–InfoWorld: “The rise of SOAs will reap an unexpected benefit for many
companies, eventually enabling them to take part in vast trading networks.”
–Gartner: “Development of Applications (SODA) is estimated
to reduce total IT expenses over the long term by as much as 20 percent.”
But perhaps the most illuminating quote is from the free online encyclopedia
Wikepedia, a resource that is used and read not only by technical IT staff, but by
everybody, including business clients: “SOA can help businesses respond more
quickly and cost-effectively to the changing market conditions…It also makes
interconnection of existing IT assets trivial.”
Although current hype is mostly about its promise, SOA will deliver several real
benefits to both IT and business when done right. It will lead to a simplified
architecture more able to adapt to change. It will lead to standardization, allowing
greater flexibility and interoperability. It will lead to greater integration of IT
solutions with each other and with business processes and users. And, as a
result of all of this, it will lead to IT cost reduction, reducing both new
development expense and also, importantly, maintenance and support costs.
But, SOA will only provide those benefits if it is applied consistently across
business processes, applications, and infrastructures. And, it will take many
years of consistent and well-managed investment.
Keeping Up with the Jones’s
Forecasts for the adoption of SOA are aggressive. Gartner predicts that by 2008,
more than 60 percent of enterprises will use SOA as a ‘guiding principle’ when
creating mission-critical applications and processes. IDC forecasts that
worldwide spending on SOA-based external services will reach $8.6 billion in
2006, a 138 percent increase from $3.6 billion in 2005; and that by 2010 global
SOA-based services
spending will reach $33.8
billion. Yankee predicts
that 2006 will be the year
of initial SOA project
completion on a broad
basis—not a hit or miss
trend, but a rising tide of
broad and deep adoption
of SOA across the market.
Also, a recent survey of IT
executives conducted by
CIO and Computerworld
Research shows more
than half (58 percent) of
the IT executives surveyed
have already implemented
SOA or are considering
implementation.
But haven’t we heard all
this before? Wasn’t the
same said about CORBA, Dot Com, Client/Server, Object Oriented
Programming, and portals? Yes, it was, but this time there is a difference: This
time all the major software vendors are behind the same standard, and the next
generation of software will all be based on SOA.
The major application vendors are creating what Hitachi Consulting is calling
SOERPA (Service Oriented ERP Applications): Oracle is betting on Oracle
Fusion, SAP has Project Vienna and ESA, and Microsoft has committed to SOA
with Dynamics and Project Green. Equally, the major vendors are all creating
technology to aid what Gartner is calling SODA (Service Oriented Development
of Applications): Microsoft has Indigo, IBM has WebSphere, Oracle has Fusion,
and BEA has AquaLogic. And finally, the network vendors are rapidly embracing
what they are referring to as Application Oriented Networking, network devices
that act as service registry and bus: Cisco has AON, IBM has DataPower, and
Intel has recently acquired Sarvega.
"2006 will be the year of
initial SOA project
completion on a broad
basis–not a hit or miss trend,
but through a rising tide of
broad and deep adoption of
SOA across the market."
—Yankee Group
Auto Industry Parallels
Direct parallels can be drawn between the software industry today and the auto
industry of 20 years ago. In the mid-1980s, the U.S. auto industry was going
through a period of change. The domestic industry had consolidated to a couple
of large players, there was increased global competition from new Asian and
European competitors, growth curves had slowed, and the drive to control and
reduce costs was leading to outsourcing. So, looking at the auto industry of
today may provide some hints as to where the software industry is heading.
Today’s auto industry is a truly global business with the same cars and brands
competing in virtually every world market. Cars are constructed on common
platforms using common components. Many different vehicles, brands, and
manufacturers share the same platforms and components. Ford shares
platforms and components with Mazda and Volvo; GM shares platforms and
components across all their brands from Saab, Opel, and Vauxhall, through
Chevrolet and Pontiac, to Cadillac and GMC. And Toyota uses the same platforms and components to create products targeted at very different markets:
Psion for youth, Toyota for middle America, and Lexus for affluent America.
Although components continue to
be manufactured offshore by a
wide range of component
suppliers, the cars themselves
are assembled onshore, close to
the consumer, where they can be
customized to their desires
and needs.
A Little Crystal
Ball Gazing
Over the next five to 10 years,
SOA will facilitate developments
in the software industry similar to
those that have taken place in the
auto industry.
Although services will
predominantly be developed
offshore, applications will be
assembled onshore where they
can be customized to client
needs. Services will come from a variety of sources, including major software
vendors, open source developers, and offshore niche vendors. If a suitable
existing service is not available, new services will be home grown using custom
development (SODA) technologies,Business Process Management (BPM)
and/or Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) tools.
Applications and services will be deployed on both public and private open
platforms. Organizations will provide private service platforms within their
firewalls, probably using network devices, and will deploy services and assemble
applications via those platforms. Public service platforms will be provided over
the Internet and applications will be assembled and deployed using open source,
home grown, and micro-charged Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings.
As integration will no longer be a barrier, assembled applications will be very
specific to organizations’ needs and desires. In effect, we will be back to best-ofbreed,
but at the service level rather than the application level. As a result, all
applications will be ‘custom’ to some degree and services will be added,
removed, and replaced as business needs change—plug and play concepts
applied to applications.
"You cannot buy SOA.
There are no magic bullet
applications or products.
And, SOA will initially
have higher upfront costs
than traditional IT system
development."
— Sa’d Kanan,
Hitachi Consulting
The Road to the Promised Land is a Rocky One
Although the future looks bright, getting there is going to be difficult, painful, and
expensive. And, for most organizations, it is also going to take far longer than
they might expect.
Unfortunately, you cannot buy SOA—there is no magic bullet application or
product. SOA also has higher initial upfront costs than traditional IT system
development, as it requires more upfront design and architecture and an initial
investment in service platform and infrastructure.
SOA will also require a paradigm shift within IT teams. A cultural change to
create and use reusable services will have to be facilitated. IT professionals will
have to be taught to trust other people’s code and to use other people’s services.
More formal methodology and tighter management and governance will have to
be adopted. Carrots and sticks will need to be created to encourage and enforce
reuse. Rules and guidelines will need to be developed regarding service ownership, sharing, and accountability. For example, who will be responsible for
fixing the problems caused in major application when a shared service fails?
Initial SOA projects will likely be very expensive as they will include lots of
foundation work and will require lots of lessons to be learned. One key lesson,
that will likely require several
rounds of trial and error, will
be determining at the level of
granularity to provide
services.
Fully realizing the benefits of
SOA will take years, maybe
a decade. And while
organizations are getting
there, the situation in IT will
likely get worse before it gets
better. The best way to think
of it is like a major highway
project: you have to close
some lanes while you are
adding the new lanes and
mass transit that will
eventually make traffic run
more smoothly. As a result,
implementing SOA will
require buy-in and
commitment across the
organization, not just
within IT.
SOA—IT Nemesis
“SOA is potentially very
dangerous for CIO's.
Expectations are already
way too high and now
business clients are
reading and hearing that
SOA will solve world
hunger. SOA could be oil
on the fire of IT client
relationship breakdown.”
—Damian Smith,
Hitachi Consulting
SOA is potentially very dangerous for CIO’s, IT leaders, and IT departments.
Expectations are already way too high. People are talking about SOA as if it will
solve world hunger. Business clients are reading and hearing that SOA will make
IT more responsive, that solutions will get developed quicker, and that IT costs
will go down. This is in an environment where IT client relationships are already
strained and expectations from business clients are often already unrealistic.
SOA could be oil on that fire.
Investments in IT architecture changes are always extremely difficult to justify,
and with an ROI that may take a decade to realize, SOA projects will be difficult
or impossible to justify on architecture alone. Therefore, the temptation will be to
leverage the raised expectations for SOA to help justify the investment, but that
path is littered with the bodies of the many IT leaders who were not able to meet
raised expectations.
There are other dangers as well. Done wrong, SOA will just add another layer to
the layer cake and increase maintenance and support costs. Although wrapping
legacy functionality as services provides some level of flexibility, it does not
remove the need to maintain and support the legacy solutions providing that
functionality. The best strategy will always be to leverage SOA to create services
and applications that can replace legacy systems.
Finally, giving in to the temptation to ignore SOA could be even more dangerous.
The hype is so intense that IT leaders will be under pressure from all sides. It will
not be long before CEOs and peers start asking their IT leaders to articulate their
SOA strategy.
SOA is coming and it will likely become the default standard within the next few
years. Depending on your organization and architecture, you may or may not
need to kick off an SOA initiative tomorrow; but it is important to start preparing
for the inevitable shift to SOA as it will impact your IT organization soon.
Start Building the Necessary Skills and Culture Now
The first step in getting ready for SOA is to start building the skills and culture
you will need in your organization.
The true art of SOA is identifying and defining services at
the correct level of granularity. Service identification and
definition will therefore not just be key skills in the new
SOA world, they will be critical. The best service
identification and definition starts with business processes.
That means IT analysts will need to become experts at
uncovering, defining, and mapping business processes.
Preferably they will also become experts at streamlining
and improving business processes.
The temptation to simply wrap existing system functionality
and expose it as service will be too hard to resist for many,
if not most organizations. In fact, in the SOA adoption
curve, it is even included as a step in the integration stage.
But, as you do this, regard it as simply a step in the right
direction and not the end solution. Remember that by
taking this approach, long-term maintenance and support
costs will not be reduced and system complexity will
actually be increased. So, the increased flexibility you will
achieve will come at a cost.
Another key step in your preparations will be the creation
of a culture that embraces reuse and application
assembly. Many developers suffer from ‘not invented here’
syndrome, preferring to recreate code themselves rather
than reuse an existing library or component or service.
Reasons for this are probably many, and range from a lack
of trust and developer ego to a cynicism and disbelief that
the benefits of reusability will ever truly be realized.
It is therefore critical that you build trust within your team, prove that you and the
organization are committed to reuse, and that it will make IT and developers
more productive and efficient. To do that you will likely need to require, and
provide incentives for, developers to use existing services. You will also probably
need to demand detailed justification whenever existing services are not used.
Effective IT governance will therefore also be critical. By its very nature, SOA
offers more flexibility, and also requires more loosely coupled moving parts. As a
result, there are more opportunities to lose control of your IT environment and
lose visibility of who is responsible for maintaining and supporting the critical
services that make up your mission critical applications.
Effective IT governance that defines and enforces the rules and policies for
managing, securing, and using services is essential. As well as ensuring
simplicity, interoperability, and scalability based on open standards, effective
governance will also reduce the likelihood of issues in the future.
But, even with good IT governance, for SOA to be truly successful, a
commitment by the enterprise (i.e. senior business leadership) to operate more
efficiently and effectively is necessary. And, gaining that commitment will require
effective change management.
“The first step in getting
ready for SOA is to start
building the skills and culture
you will need in your
organization…. the creation
of a culture that embraces
reuse and application
assembly will be critical.”
—Damian Smith,
Hitachi Consulting
“By 2008, more than 60
percent of enterprises will use
SOA as a ‘guiding principle’
when creating mission-critical
applications and processes."
—Gartner
Show Progress without Raising Expectations
The key will be to start making some real progress with SOA while avoiding
setting expectations too high, especially among your business clients. Start by
piloting SOA in a small way within IT. Find a small-scale project with which to
experiment, build skills, and learn from mistakes. Don’t publicize this effort; treat
it as a “Skunk Works” if you can, but make sure that key members of your team
are involved and are learning.
At the same time, start educating your business clients about the benefits and
realities of SOA. Use the hype to your advantage, but control it and leverage it
on your own terms. Perhaps you might hold a workshop, or a series of
workshops, targeted at IT staff and at key business stakeholders. Use these
workshops to build support for tackling SOA and long-term transformation within
IT, but also make sure to explain the realities of adoption and the level of
commitment necessary. Explain the adoption curve and set realistic expectations
about returns, timelines, and results.
SOA Logical Architecture
Following the workshops, identify a friendly business unit with which to partner.
Work with that partner to develop an SOA roadmap for that business division or
area. That roadmap should outline all of the major services and architecture that
will be deployed over time. It should also identify an initial project that you can
use to prove the SOA concepts and ideas, likely something to do with customer
data integration, or a self-service portal, or a single view of something. Whatever
it is, it should have a limited scope and a small number of services, several of
which should be easily reusable. It should also solve a key business issue and
preferably result in the retirement of some legacy IT solutions.
Obtain buy-in from the business unit sponsors for the roadmap and the initial
project and start moving. Use the first few projects to lay the foundation
architecture and infrastructure so your cost per service will decrease over time.
Conclusions and Next Steps
SOA is real and it is really coming. Unlike other hyped technologies and
standards like CORBA and EJB etc., all the major software vendors are adopting
SOA. In our opinion, there’s no avoiding it—you can delay, but it will hurt you
long term if you do.
Managed well, SOA offers IT a tremendous opportunity to make some real
positive changes and lay a foundation that will allow them to become the
responsive, cost-effective IT organization their business clients are demanding.
But, SOA is also a potential minefield that can destroy an IT leader’s reputation
and career. Hype is raising expectations beyond reality in an environment that is
already stressed. No matter how you do it, SOA will require investment and
commitment across the organization and managed poorly, it can be an
expensive and spectacular failure.
Hitachi Consulting recommends that most IT organizations adopt SOA as quickly
as possible, but be realistic about timelines and control expectations. Gaining
control of the hype cycle as soon as possible so expectations can be set is
critical. Also critical is reducing risk by starting small, learning from mistakes, and
building the skills and culture you will need.
For more information on Hitachi Consulting’s SOA services and examples of how
we have helped IT leaders and IT organizations plan, control, and move forward
with their SOA strategies and initial projects, please do not hesitate to call Hitachi
Consulting today at 1.877.664.0010.
Author Bio
Damian Smith
Managing Vice President, Hitachi Consulting
Damian Smith is the Managing Vice President of the Corporate Management
Solutions practice at Hitachi Consulting which encompasses all of Hitachi
Consulting’s services and solutions for IT, Finance, HCM and Corporate Operations.
Smith has over 15 years of consulting and management experience gained serving
some of the largest and most influential corporations in the US and Europe in areas
that include business strategy and planning, business transformation, business
process improvement, strategic technology planning, IT effectiveness and
information systems development and implementation.
Having worked both within, and as an advisor to, IT departments and leadership;
and as a business client to IT, Smith has been able to develop a relatively rare
combination of business and technology skills and experience. As a result, Smith
has been able to command the respect of both business and technical / engineering
teams and develop several practical solutions and best practices to common IT
issues. A people oriented collaborative leader who is not afraid to tackle the tough
issues or broach difficult subjects with team members and executives, Smith’s specialty is working with clients to facilitate agreement, and progression towards,
common business and technology goals.
About Hitachi Consulting
As Hitachi, Ltd.’s (NYSE: HIT) global consulting company, Hitachi Consulting is a
recognized leader in delivering proven business and IT solutions to Global 2000
companies across many industries. We leverage decades of business process,
vertical industry, and leading-edge technology experience to understand each
company’s unique business needs. From business strategy development
through application deployment, our consultants are committed to helping clients
quickly realize measurable business value and achieve sustainable ROI.
With offices in the U.S., Japan and Europe, Hitachi Consulting’s client base
includes nearly 35 percent of the Fortune 100, 25 percent of the Global 100, as
well as many leading mid-market companies. We offer a client-focused,
collaborative approach, which integrates strategy, people, process and
technology, and we transfer knowledge throughout each engagement. For more
information, call 877.664.0010 or visit www.hitachiconsulting.com.
Hitachi Consulting – Inspiring your next success!®
About Hitachi
Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE: HIT/TSE: 6501), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is a leading
global electronics company, with approximately 356,000 employees worldwide.
Fiscal 2005 (ended March 31, 2006) consolidated sales totaled 9, 464 billion yen
($80.9 billion). The company offers a wide range of systems, products and services
in market sectors including information systems, electronic devices, power and
industrial systems, consumer products, materials and financial services. For more
information on Hitachi, please visit the company's Web site at
www.hitachi.com.
© 2006 Hitachi Consulting Corporation. All rights reserved. "Inspiring your next success", "Knowledge-Driven Consulting"
and "Information Velocity" are registered service marks of Hitachi Consulting Corporation. Printed in USA.
Contents
- Introduction
- “Faster, Faster, Faster!”
- Layer Cake Architecture
- The IT Catch 22
- Enter Service Oriented Architecture—IT Savior
- Keeping Up with the Jones’s
- Auto Industry Parallels
- A Little Crystal Ball Gazing
- The Road to the Promised Land is a Rocky One
- SOA—IT Nemesis
- Start Building the Necessary Skills and Culture Now
- Show Progress without Raising Expectations
- Conclusions and Next Steps
- About Hitachi Consulting
- About Hitachi