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Do customers really want an SOA?

For someone new to the term or concept of an SOA a quick search reveals a couple of dozens software companies positioning themselves as leaders in the market. Trade press and other industry pundits have pondered numerous questions and made many predictions. Will 2005 be the year for SOA? Will this be the year customers implement an SOA? Will SOA be most talked about term of the year? Will it become the most over hyped term?

I'd like to add one more to the list. Do customers even want an SOA?

Nearly all conversations or stories read about SOAs focus on flexibility, breaking down applications into services, modular, reuse, increased availability and management of services. These are all important characteristic to have in an IT infrastructure, but what does all this mean? These conversations are often discussed in a vacuum void of any real business problem or opportunity that needs to be addressed. This creates risk that SOAs may evolve into the use of technology for technology's sake. They slice, they dice, they do anything you need them to do faster, cheaper and more efficient than anything else ever created. The industry is just starting to recover from the downfall created the last time this happened.

I haven't met with a single customer that said their top business concern is their inability to create services out of applications. What is missing in the conversation are real business problems customers need to solve today. Telco and wireless service providers worry about customer churn. Pharmaceuticals stay up nights trying to get new drugs that save lives to market faster. Airlines want to maximize capacity on flights. Retailers look to increase traffic in stories and maximize efficiencies in multi channel strategies. Hospitals want patient records kept up to date and available to doctors when needed during emergencies.

Solving real business problems is critical to helping customers transform to on demand businesses that can quickly respond to rapidly changing market environments. An SOA can help do this by providing an industry standard framework that is interchangeable, adaptive and flexible, but most important it is closely linked to the business. The industry standards argument for nearly every other successful use of industry standards also applies to SOAs. Standards make it easier to do business and create efficiencies of scale.

IBM recently announced a new service offering focused on this exact issue. Service Oriented Modeling and Architecture (SOMA) provides an approach to building an SOA that aligns to the business goals. It helps customers tie business processes to underlying applications to help the business realize benefits more rapidly. However, the key differentiator for SOMA is where the discussion starts. It's with the business problem.

To make improvements and grow, businesses need better visibility into their business processes. Breaking the business down into component view -- from a discrete process or the business processes supporting the entire enterprise -- is critical to achieving business improvement and growth. Business process modeling will map out a companies' business processes and help determine which business processes provide strategic differentiation over competitors, what processes are core and what business processes may not be considered strategic.

Nearly every business process in every company is linked to technology. Once the business process change or enhancement aimed at growth has been identified, the technology conversation can now begin.

Customers need to approach building an SOA based on the needs of the business. A detailed identification and prioritization of services that a business needs to develop or expose to support improved business processes must be developed. A company, or more specifically, and IT department, can't guess what services will add the greatest value. They need a systematic approach to building a roadmap for implementing a service-oriented architecture.

This approach can help ensure that goals set by business process modeling can actually be implemented to generate the greatest result in an efficient manner. Evolving an SOA across the enterprise frees up IT resources and helps to ensure that investments in technology are focused on core capabilities aimed at growing the business.

Getting back to my original question, I doubt that I'll meet with a customer this year or in any other year that demands they must have an SOA. An SOA is a roadmap. It's a means to an end. What they are demanding is flexibility to become on demand businesses that maximize revenue, get drugs to market, decrease churn and increase patient care. An SOA is an industry standard way to help them to do that.