Departmental turf wars delay SOA rollouts, says IBM

As managers argue about who should pay for service-oriented architecture systems, is there a better way to put the business case?

Firms’ adoption of service-oriented architecture (SOA) is being hampered by the reluctance of department managers to fully fund initiatives if the benefits will be shared by other departments, according to senior executives at IBM.

Speaking to IT Week at the vendor's SOA business-centric summit in London, they said arguments over which departments should control and fund particular IT services are "the number one inhibitor" to widespread adoption of SOAs. Advocates of SOAs claim these systems deliver more flexible applications by allowing firms to deploy reusable components.

Sandy Carter, IBM's vice president of SOA and WebSphere strategy, channels and marketing, argued the biggest problem for CIOs wanting to deploy SOAs was the difficulty of gaining funding for IT services or applications that run across multiple departments.

"I spoke to one European government recently that wanted to develop a shared service for inputting passport numbers," said Shaw. "But because the functionality was going to be shared by six different departments they couldn't agree who was going to fund it."

Neil Ward-Dutton of analyst firm MWD Advisors agreed that allocating costs for SOA projects can be a challenge and recommended that IT chiefs should set up an SOA “centre of excellence” with its own budget and board-level backing to develop cross-departmental SOA projects.

Ward-Dutton added that IT directors should choose SOA projects that demonstrate clear commercial benefits, and should ask SOA software vendors to help them to justify the cost. "The vendors really are falling over each other to educate people about SOA, even to the extent where they are offering free tools and consulting, so I'd get them in to help you make the business case," he said.

If a separately funded centre of excellence is not possible, firms should explore other funding models, said Carter. She said firms could deploy tools to monitor how much business departments use shared IT services and then charge them accordingly.

IT chiefs could also offer incentives to their developers to encourage wider use of reusable SOA components, Carter said. "At IBM, developers get awards based on how many patents they produce," she said. "But with SOA you want to encourage people to reuse components rather than develop new ones, so in some departments we have had to change our awards model to reflect that."

Despite the problems, Carter insisted that firms’ internal squabbles over spending would slow rather than halt SOA adoption. She said the attendance of almost 500 companies at IBM’s SOA event in London proved interest in the technology was growing: "Only nine months ago we had 250 companies here at an SOA summit in London, today we have 495."

However, Ward-Dutton said that departments’ continued resistance to sharing data and application components meant conditions for enterprise-wide adoption of SOAs are not widespread. "What we're seeing is companies are completing successful pilots, but it is only very forward-looking companies or those that are experiencing a high level of pain across the business that are willing to overcome the cultural hurdles that block the deployment of enterprise-wide SOAs, " he said. "It tends to be companies that are losing competitiveness or need to achieve compliance that have realised they need to automate processes and services across multiple departments."