Application Architecture, Development & Integration

I just read a PAINFULLY funny post by Frank Kenney called Ahh Shucks, SOA is a Failure.  He nails the top reasons why SOA initiatives fail and not so subtly points out that the person in charge of the initiative is far from blameless or powerless.  In addition to not lining up with key business neeeds, the other reason for failure that just KILLS me is “I failed to provide my developers incentives to reuse artifacts”.

We (the development community) have made this mistake countless times.  After all, weren’t we going to drive reuse through function calls, stored procedures, objects, etc.?  I can promise you that unless you do the following, you are leaving reuse to chance (at best):

• Provide a catalog or library of what should be reused
• Make sure things to be reused are of high quality
• Specify reuse in your methodology
• Incent project managers, developers, and buisness people to reuse things
• Measure whether reuse occurs
• Reward reuse when it occurs

Most of the failings of SOA can be attributed to failings in governance.  Check out Frank’s session on Governance of B2B Web Services in SOA and his Analyst User Roundtable on Best Practices in SOA Governance.  Also make sure to see SOA Horror Stories to hear a painfully entertaining view of major SOA-related mistakes and how to avoid them.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 7:00 am and is filed under SOA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.