Engine Factory

The value proposition is significant because of the intended business focus while leveraging inherent economies of scale through service reuse across LOB’s. Previous innovation cycles often focused more on IT – witness either distributed computing with CORBA or the application server revolution. However, there are risks.

SOA requires tech savvy and disciplined management, substantial centralization of SOA planning and engineering, potentially a change to incent managers less on completing projects for LOB’s and more for the enterprise’s profitability. In the past, only the most IT savvy companies had mature software engineering process and the people talented enough to follow them. SOA requires even more engineering up front and without it, organizations are at risk of having an overwhelming failure with their initiatives. Overwhelming in the sense that SOA has enterprise wide implications. As with prior IT initiatives, SOA will be hard to quantify in terms of ROI.

Several critical questions need to be addressed.

1. Who in the enterprise will pay the additional cost to build services for enterprise wide use.
2. Once enabled, do other LOB’s get services free?
3. Will past-unprioritized access to resources prevail or will asset utilization finally be linked to business priorities and profitability.