Funding rows slow SOA growth

In-fighting over budgets is hampering the uptake of service oriented architecture within corporates

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 IBM.

Speaking to IT Week at its SOA summit in London last week, Sandy Carter, IBM’s vice-president of SOA and WebSphere strategy, said the biggest problem faced by IT chiefs trying 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 inputing passport numbers,” Carter said. “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 said that the reluctance of departments to share data and application components meant there were few enterprise-wide SOAs. “It is only very forward-looking companies or those firms 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.

Ward-Dutton advised IT chiefs to set up an SOA “centre of excellence” within their organisation and ensure it has its own budget and board-level backing to develop cross-departmental SOA projects.

IT directors should also choose SOA projects that demonstrate clear commercial benefits, according to Ward-Dutton, and make use of software vendors’ resources. “Vendors are falling over each other to educate people about SOAs, even to the extent where they are offering free tools and consulting,” he said.

Meanwhile, Carter pointed companies towards tools that monitor departments to record how they use shared IT services, so IT chiefs can charge them accordingly.