Real ROI from SOA case study

I'm not sure if everyone noticed this week's Info World's article Five ways to roll out SOA (Nov 5th, 2007).

In this article, Galen Gruman describes 5 case studies of Big-name companies that "are jumping into SOA, changing the way organizations plan, develop, and deploy enterprise applications".

One of the most interesting quotes he provided was directly related to SOA's always elusive ROI.

"For Thomson Financial, the results of service compliance automation are dramatic, Mitevski says: “It used to take 20 people in a highly orchestrated process across various groups to go live [with a service]. Now it takes just a single person.”"

This number translates to huge savings in human resources, TTM (time to market) and TCO (total cost of ownership).

If you will add to that what Gartner says: "It is 30 times more expensive to fix issues that are caught in production", you can begin to understand why the ROI from design time governance is so much higher then attempting to use registries/repositories or WS Management runtime solutions.

Yes, you must have them as part of your Governance infrastructure, but if you want to get things right you should start with a Policy Management solution that spans across the entire life cycle. Just the same way Thomson Financial did.

Re: Observations from the InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum 2007

Re: Observations from the InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum 2007

Too bad Dave Linthicum left the conference before the presentation from Jon Eisenstein, the Global CTO of GE Money.

In that presentation he would have heard about "a true agile architecture" with focus on "ROI".

John described 2 past attempts at an enterprise wide SOA initiative and he explained why they failed as well as what to do so things will not "go horrible wrong".

I will make sure to add here a link to Jon's presentation once it is available online.