Companies driving investment in service orientation will encounter a crucial stumbling block when funding SOA initiatives, as a return on investment (ROI) on initial projects may not be immediately evident or visible.
So says Michael Barnard, senior manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers South Africa Advisory Services, who adds that many organisations are faced with this dilemma. "This only occurs when there is insufficient focus on the business process dimension of a holistic SOA. Unless the initial SOA project can be linked up to a specific process improvement within the value chain, it will be hard to justify the initial investment."
According to him, the initial implementation of SOA for the first projects can be more expensive than the traditional approach. However, he says, as projects evolve, the cost and benefit break-even is reached and the business returns are increased.
In a conventional approach there are incremental costs associated with each additional project, and returns can even be diminishing, as one may have to revisit and modify existing processes to accommodate change.
He advises companies considering moving to SOA to beware of a radical once-off 'big bang' approach. Barnard says companies should hold service discovery workshops and decide how many and which services they want to start off with. They can then add to this incrementally over time, building up a comprehensive library of services.
"In the legacy reactive style of business architecture, data was contained in silos or specific applications that cannot communicate with each other effectively," he explains.
"When change occurred, there would be a domino effect and many tightly woven, interconnected systems would need modification. In an SOA environment, business solutions are more loosely coupled with each other, but are still highly interoperable. In our view, service orientation is a holistic approach to how the business functions, which includes both the business process world and the underlying infrastructure"
This fluid process approach, will, in the medium-term, yield hard business returns both in driving down maintenance costs and facilitating faster development of new products, he says.
"Without the process approach, the organisation is really just connecting applications - an infrastructural approach without visible ROI."
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