The Next Leap in Productivity: What Top Managers Really Need to Know about Information Technology

5.2. SOA Is the New Lingua Franca

The Internet has been around for a while, everybody has had some degree of experience with it, and our expectations have been set by the best Web applications out there. These expectations will continue rising for the foreseeable future.

What does this mean? It means that whatever business you think you are in, you are really in the service business, and you are providing (and consuming) services over the Web.

Which means that like it or not, you are going to adopt a service-oriented architecture (if you haven't already), or your company is going to perish, because SOA is the language that this new marketplace speaks.

Some executives still resist the whole SOA movement, but this argument is over; the marketplace has decided. We will explain why this is in a moment, but first, come to terms with this fact: you are an SOA shop now.

In adopting SOA, your IT infrastructure is going to have to move to a model of published APIs (application program interfaces) that are used by internal and external parties over whom you have no control. Depending on how far along the adoption curve you are, this may prove to be a long, wrenching process fraught with technical, economic, managerial, and cultural obstacles.

And the return on investment, at first, may be negligible. If you are a chief information officer (CIO) proposing a big budget for moving to this new architecture and your boss wants to know what the project return on investment (ROI) is, you may have ...