SOA customers look for good governance

Companies which use service oriented architecture (SOA) have reported a lack of maturity and governance practices, new research has shown.

German business infrastructure and SOA vendor Software AG surveyed its customer base of 200 large enterprise users and found more than 90 per cent already had some form of SOA strategic planning in place for running their SOA projects.

More than half of all enterprises had already implemented successful SOA-based projects or an enterprise-wide SOA. Respondents also reported considerable satisfaction with their progress to date, with less than 10 per cent expressing dissatisfaction with results and progress so far.

Despite this, nearly two thirds rated their SOA governance practices as either “non-existent” or “insufficient.” Only seven per cent rated their SOA implementations as “mature”.

Miko Matsumura, Software AG vice president and deputy chief technology officer, said: “Enterprises have taken the first step in admitting that there is a problem. Now they can take the additional steps needed to address the issues highlighted by the report, such as overwhelming IT complexity, lack of business buy-in and a genuine skills shortage.”

The top factors driving SOA adoption were a desire to improve business agility, simplify integration, and support business process management (BPM) initiatives.

The key inhibitors to more widespread adoption were identified as the lack of required skills, the complexity of current IT environments, the lack of business support and the difficulty in quantify return on investment.

For example, the survey found fewer than 20 per cent received active support from their chief information officer. And SOA had yet to expand far beyond the firewall as only one in five reported having exposed more than a quarter of their existing services externally.

Nevertheless, full lifecycle governance was seen as critical by 70 per cent of respondents, who concluded that each stage of the SOA lifecycle - from design and run to change-time governance - were of equal importance.

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