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In order to realize these benefits, you must make a sustained investment in SOA. The return
happens over time—specifically, the amount of time it takes for your organization to have
some significant number of services and a significant number of consumers. You must track,
so that you can later show, the cost avoidance benefits due to your SOA efforts.
ROI implications of building out services within traditional projects
As you are building out your SOA, it is unlikely that you will be given a blank check and a
well-appointed private room and told to write services until it's done. Most of your services
will be developed alongside or as part of traditional application development projects. The
way that these projects are budgeted, and the way that their ROI is determined, will not take
into account the potential ROI locked inside the services that you will develop. That ROI will
only be realized across a long time frame, as it obtains stature within a vibrant SOA.
So that presents a challenge. Specifically, you need to create a separate business case and a
separate ROI prospect for the services themselves, taking their role within SOA into account.
That is, the business case for creating the application that will use a service that you're about
to develop will not be the same as the business case for the service itself.
Project managers and business managers will often want to conflate the service and the initial
application that consumes it. This is tempting because it's easy to do, it's what we're used to,
and we spent a long time learning our existing IT tools for project management. However, that
doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.
You must protect the long-term life of the SOA by showing the benefits with which it rewards
the business for its patience. You won't be able to do that if the ROI is baked together with
applications. Baking them together is a kind of category mistake. The use of the application
project will generally be well known, clearly understood, and fairly succinct. An application
that allows business users to change the prices of their products is probably not going to be
used in any other way.
Just as you govern and monitor the life cycle of the services themselves, be prepared to govern
their ROI life cycle as well. This will require a separate set of criteria than in traditional
project-based software applications. For example, consider an item such as Time Value. Ser-
vices can allow you to reduce batch processing cycles. Typical data warehouses perform ETL
(extract, transform, and load) operations that can take significant time to process. This results
in “data latency,” postponing the ability to make business decisions. Rather than saving data
in staging areas and moving it around the enterprise, SOA may allow you to get to your data
more quickly through data-based services.
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