Last week we held the Gartner Fall Application Architecture, Development and Integration (ADI) Summit in Las Vegas. This is our SOA flagship event. By many attendee accounts the summit was a great success. I’d like to wrap up the fall conference with a few bottom lines (this may look familiar to those who saw my opening keynote) that deserve gleaning.

SOA is indeed a journey and in the keynote I used a personification analogy of building a strong relationship between SOA and IT. Therefore, sticking to the analogy, I asked the audience to think of the conference as a three day relationship building retreat with the keynote as the initial counseling session to kick off the retreat. I played the role of SOA and asked Sue Landry to play the role of my relationship partner IT. I also asked Roy Schulte to join us as our relationship counselor. We then put on a little “play” addressing the major relationship challenges between SOA and IT. We talked about the following IT/SOA relationship challenges:

1. I Don’t See What I Get Out of This Relationship with SOA
2. IT Isn’t Ready for This Relationship
3. SOA Does Whatever It Wants (I Can’t Control It)
4. IT Has Too Much Baggage
5. IT Won’t Change
6. I Don’t See a Future in a SOA Relationship
7. IT Is Trying to Move Too Fast in This Relationship

The Bottom Line takeaways that goes with each of these challenges are:

1. Build SOA business cases and measure success
2. Actively mature your organizational SOA competency; don’t simply deploy SOA technologies
3. Use governance as the guardian of SOA success
4. Capitalize on SOA as a reason for and path toward IT modernization
5. Instill new application development thinking and behaviors to realize SOA agility and shareability benefits
6. Explore SOA’s evolution to augment your road map and derive deeper value from SOA
7. Employ an SOA road map to grow SOA incrementally as a key part of your applications strategy

I’m reiterating these because they are the major messages of the conference and the 70+ presentations, workshops, and round tables were all about working on improving these competencies.

I hope the conference was a productive and enjoyable experience. See you in June at the next ADI summit!

Thank you, Anthony Bradley