Enterprise SOA

Just how much and what kind of change will ESA involve?

One of the promises of ESA is that you won't have to blow up your IT infrastructure and start over. Once they understand ESA, many IT professionals wonder how wide the scope of change will be. They ask, "Will we have to blow up our infrastructure, org chart, and even supply chain, and start over? How is that a benefit?"

No one will have to blow up anyone or anything in the pursuit of ESA, and so far, no one has managed to blow themselves up, either. According to Forrester Research, for example, 75 percent of all large companies (defined as 20,000 employees or more) had begun implementing service-oriented architecture (SOA) components, and their biggest reason by far for doing so was internal integration.^[*] The first phase of adoption is largely used to repair and connect the mistakes and unplanned disconnects within the current architecture. Evolving toward ESA is a continuous process marked by steady improvement as the new architecture gradually replaces the old. It does so organically, not via dynamite.

But if you're serious about adopting ESA, you need to think long and hard about where ESA will take your organization before you worry about how, when, and how much it will cost to get there, "there" being a new relationship between business and IT, as shown in Figure 3-1, that supports process innovation and creates lasting competitive advantage.

That's the purpose of this chapter. You've read the business case for ESA and ...