Michael Blechar

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Mike Blechar
VP Distinguished Analyst
17 years at Gartner
43 years IT industry

Michael Blechar is vice president and distinguished analyst in the Information Management Research area of Gartner's Research and Advisory Services. Mr. Blechar specializes in the area of metadata management/repositories, information and data services…Read Full Bio

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Justifying the Value Of SOA

by Michael Blechar  |  May 2, 2009  |  2 Comments

Two of the most common questions I get from Gartner clients who are considering implementing a service-oriented architecture (SOA) are 1) “What are Gartner customers seeing in terms of the value of SOA in their organizations?” and 2) “How do I justify the cost of moving to SOA to the business and management?” My colleagues Anthony Bradley, Paolo Malinverno, Dan Sholler and Roy Schulte have just released a couple of research notes which I can highly recommend as answers to these questions – “Survey Update: The Value of SOA” and “Building an SOA Business Case: A Gartner Framework.”

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But, as I frequently tell clients, addressing SOA without also addressing business process management (BPM) sub-optimizes the value and arguably jeopardizes the success of SOA. Until the business processes get redesigned based on a services mentality, and application and solution architects design shared software and data services at a level of granularity which is consistent with the business service design and governance rules, the main value of SOA – application agility – will be significantly constrained. For more details see my blog post on “Why Architects and Developers Need To Collaborate” for more details.

*Available to Gartner clients or for a fee

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2 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Michelle Peterson   May 4, 2009 at 12:04 pm

    +1.

    I would also say that SOA should not be a big-bang approach. It should align with business requirements to return the most ROI benefit.

  • 2 Michael Blechar   May 4, 2009 at 5:54 pm

    Yep, IMO you are absolutely right, Michelle. The real value of SOA is enabling business improvement – which seldom is done using big bang approaches.

    But at the same time, let us realize that it’s also difficult to implement SOA completely “piece meal”. For example, identifying how requirements will be approved, tracked and managed along with with the right level of governance policies and procedures can start at a pilot project level, but pretty soon needs to be incorporated on a broader scale for subsequent projects.

    So, figuring how broad (i.e. big bang) to make aspects of SOA as part of both single project-oriented ROI and longer term cross-project ROI and total cost of ownership must be part of an intelligent transition strategy. A collaborative future solution architecture helps make those intelligent choices.

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