Java Reference
In-Depth Information
There's no ROI in SOA
The contrarian view suggests that there may notbe significant ROI that can be readily and
clearly associated with SOA. This view says:
▪ SOA is an architecture. It is a particular strategy for building software. It is not a business
venture (unless you live in the Bay Area). It gives you certain benefits, and the reason that
it has become popular in recent years is that it is an architecture that includes the business
within its scope. It can generate real business value, but it's not clear how an architectural
approach translates readily and directly into a return on investment.
▪ SOA is a way to make the software you really care about. Let me make the point this way.
If it's fair to ask what the ROI on SOA is, then it is presupposed that SOA issomething:
that is, that it's a product in its own right that the business is interested in. But I suspect that
this would be greeted with considerable skepticism. The great Irish playwright Samuel
Beckett once wrote, “Art isn't aboutsomething, it issomething.” With SOA, it's the op-
posite: SOA is aboutsomething, it isn'tanything. SOA helps you make the products that
your business needs. SOA is not what you want; it helps you get what you want. It's just
another cost of doing business. In the same way, businesses may not want to spend $25
million on a building for their corporate headquarters. But you can't have very productive
executive meetings in a tent in the backyard.
▪ SOA is a software strategy that has certain aims, including better support of business ini-
tiatives. Within the context of a pilot project, in which you build a service and perhaps a
project around it in order to show value quickly and support your fledgling SOA, it may
be easy to see how avoiding services altogether and writing the application using a tradi-
tional, baked-in approach would be far less expensive. Detractors from the idea of SOA
ROI suggest that there are other reasons for creating a SOA: that as an approach to soft-
ware, the better able SOA is to support your business initiatives, the more return you can
realize in the context of your business initiatives. However, they would contend that there
is little way to precisely map real dollars to SOA.
▪ SOA has certain benefits, not every conceivable benefit, including ready-bake ROI. Busi-
nesses do things all the time that don't show tangible returns. For example, many com-
panies send 2, 3, 6, or 10 employees to the JavaOne conference each year, or have large,
lavish corporate parties. Such items, frequently contextualized as “team building” and re-
lated matters, are difficult to map directly to a return. But these companies believe that
such events and others like them help create a desirable workplace. While desirability can-
not be quantified, it seems reasonable to believe that such benefits can allow companies
to hire and retain better employees and to have a more productive workforce. Intangible
benefits, such as “increased customer satisfaction” and “improved customer service” are
no less real simply because they are difficult or impossible to quantify.
