SOA Patience
As I mentioned in my blog on SOA governance SOA efforts (especially at large banks) are monumental tasks, requiring a very different paradigm (one of collaboration) to be engrained in the social infrastructure. This takes time. The technologies that enable SOA’s are available (granted, they have to be adopted, integrated, which also takes time and patience), but don’t underestimate the time it takes for a federated and collaborative process to be adopted.Regarding the technology, the expectation needs to be set (or reset as the case may be) that the changes technically are more likely a three to seven year evolution. Some of the confusion on SOA timing expectation likely came from the traditional notion of installing something “and you’re done”. You don’t “install” an SOA, rather you evolve your architecture and governance process towards it. As I’ve preached before starting small, and taking baby steps is a key to SOA success, and I see a lot of enterprises doing exactly that, which of course is slow, but progressive.
The IT industry in general likes to come up with new names and acronyms for things all the time, so over time we may be calling SOA something else (“SOA” is merely a renaming of multiple distributed computing attempts before it). But regardless of what it’s called, flexible composite solutions comprised of loosely coupled parts in a federated process is the goal for the organizations SunGard works with (25,000 customers). Many of our customers (mostly financial institutions) are motivated by intense market pressure to improve the way they do things and to respond quicker to the needs of their clients, (which in the financial services space, demand for innovative products is ever increasing). Whatever you call it, they will be investing heavily in agility.