Today Business Integration Forum in Wiesbaden started with a keynote from Dr. Martin. An interesting chapter of his presentation was the result of the ‘SOA Check 2008’ survey. 60 companies in Germany where asked about the maturity and structure of their SOA strategies. Here just some findings, which were interesting to me.
Finding 1: The SOA hype is over. This is a very satisfying finding. Technology is not used heavily when it’s up on the life cycle. When companies adopt technologies on a broader range, they always recognize that there are challenges. There is no “Non Challenge Business Software”. The “no hype anymore” statement shows that SOA is now arriving in companies.
Finding 2: There is no SOA governance. 20% of the interviewed companies have SOA governance in place. 55% are planning to implement SOA governance. 24% are not planning to have governance. To be honest - these results are scary. Without governance SOA will not be successful. It might must fail in the long run. Two questions came up to me: Question 1: Is it a tool problem? Question 2: Is it an organizational problem?
Finding 3: SOA did not reach the operational departments yet. 67% of the SOA project leaders are from IT. Just 9% are from operational departments. There are new job descriptions in IT asking for service engineers, service administrators or service composers but there are very few job descriptions in the business area asking for process managers. Here we have another SOA success barrier. Business can’t work without IT and IT doesn’t know what to do without business. Please – start talking to each other… You find the detailed survey in German here:
