I have just come back from a short trip to the IT conference "OMG Information Days 2008" in Munich, where I lectured on some SOA best-practices. The one-day conference was not really crowded, just roughly 50-60 people. So I wonder if this reflects a declining interest in SOA or has the world-wide recession already started to pulverise travel and training budgets? Anyway, what to take home from my stay in Munich...
First of all, much agreement by the participants with my statement that the majority of SOA projects in the past have partially or totally failed. I believe that the huge failure rate is largely related to that fact that SOA is mostly seen as a pure IT-issue. So it is not surprising that SOA projects are run under the auspices of IT departments that naturally concentrate on technical aspects.
The widespread and quite accepted requirement that business and IT must be involved together in order to tackle the complexity seems to be ignored in the practice or gets somehow lost during the project execution phase.
Integrated software solutions like Oracle BPA Suite (BPA = Business Process Analysis) could help as they enforce to some degree that business processes are used as a starting point and provide the blueprint for the technical process representations. Of course under the hood, it is powered by ARIS! So good reasons to take a look at it!