The SOA Network Effect: Technical and Cultural Issues Drive Value

Computerworld - SOAs are in vogue now. While many organizations are wrestling with the technical issues of service-oriented architectures (SOA) and Web services, they are overlooking the organizational and cultural aspects of SOAs that will drive business value faster.

This brings up a "chicken or the egg" scenario. "Should we build the SOA enabling technical architecture first and worry about the cultural and behavioral issues later? Or should we focus on education, training and the supporting cultural systems -- SOA organizational competencies -- that will reinforce the use of the SOA technology?"

In an ideal world, an organization should do both. Building the proper SOA technical and organizational/cultural capabilities will facilitate maximum SOA use by the potential universe of business and IT users and lead to overall SOA success. This is as much driven by technical issues as it is by softer ones -- education, training, encouragement, reward and compensation systems, and others. If these two facets of SOA adoption are addressed upfront, SOAs will demonstrate increasing returns -- what I call the "SOA Network Effect."

The right technical architecture will facilitate faster service creation as well as increased use of the SOA, which will drive increased business value through the combination of more users and services. The SOA Network Effect will help organizations achieve the business results of an SOA in an accelerated time frame, but only if the organizational, cultural and behavioral processes of SOA are in place.

The SOA Network Effect is predicated on the tactical and strategic benefits of an SOA combined with processes that drive more services and more users of the available services. Providing IT functionality as cross-platform shared services in a SOA generates a number of benefits including asset reuse, reduced integration expenses, greater IT and business productivity, and greater enterprise agility.

Once a portfolio of Web services is available to be leveraged in an SOA, the asset reuse and other SOA benefits multiply and cause the SOA Network Effect, where the value of the SOA increases as the number of available services and the number of users using those services increases. This benefit compounds over time as the SOA is leveraged internally and externally. SOAs demonstrate increasing returns in this fashion.

The question becomes one of how many services and how many users of those services are required to trigger the accelerated model of increasing returns? And what technical factors are most important to achieving the SOA Network Effect? And what organization and cultural factors will facilitate the SOA Network Effect? (Again, what comes first, the chicken or the egg?) Let's explore some technical and cultural/organizational factors that can facilitate achieving the SOA Network Effect.