Only 7% say SOA exceeded expectations!!

Interesting survey on SOA Adoption: "The Dark Side of SOA"

Out of 273 business and technical professionals:

1. 24% say projects fall short of expectations
2. 55% say SOA introduced more IT complexity
3. 41% say SOA projects cost more than expected
4. Only 7% say SOA exceeded expectations!!

According to HP's SOA executive director, Terri Schoenrock, these failures are because of "misalignment between business and IT goals." That's probably true. To add to this, I think, the program management teams are the ones that don't understand the power of SOA and how it impacts different functional groups. Since PMs are the facilitators and co-ordinators, the failure of SOA projects fall on their shoulders.

The article also mentions "As software grows over hundreds and thousands of components slated for reuse, and Web Services extend beyond company walls, having right tools to manage them is critical."

Probably it's not even management's fault. It is the lack of right tools that has crippled their ability manage SOA projects and their interdependencies effectively. SOA is about busines agility and continuous change!

By reducing the size of projects, and increasing the overall number of projects, SOA has created problems for the IT organization and the management. Companies don't have right tools that can help project managers to manage more projects, QA to test more efficiently and IT to deploy more frequently. Legacy tools are tied with legacy processes, which doesn't fit perfectly for SOA needs.

New technology (SOA) is pushing for new processes (in IT, Development, Project Management, and QA) and the new processes won't be efficient without the new tools.

The article also points at the SOA governance issues for the failures. According to IBM's VP of Web Services and SOA, Michael Liebow, companies with savvy executive teams tend to be most efective at governing SOA projects!

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