I’d like to provide another perspective on the question of “does SOA adoption matter”? 

I believe we may be asking the wrong question.  

First of all SOA is a how, rather than a what.  It describes an architectural, organizational and cultural approach for enabling IT to more quickly create or leverage their digital investments, sometimes through trusted re-use, to meet changing business requirements now and over time.  That said, IT may chose to acquire new technologies to assist in adopting the SOA approach.  These technologies may involve new standards such as Web Services, new application stacks, new integration tools, new platforms to manage the lifecycles of services, to manage service quality, or to enable loosely coupled policy enforcement.  Many people equate the adoption and deployment of such technologies as “SOA adoption” or equate SOA adoption to the building out of Web Services.

To me, what matters is IT’s transformation to an organization that can more rapidly respond to the business and even become a driver of new business opportunity.  The transformation to a Service Oriented Architecture (emphasis on the cultural shift to “service-oriented” and the methodological shift implicit in the word “architecture) is one of the most proven methods to assist IT in achieving these goals.  In that sense, adoption of SOA matters. 

That said, however, the most valuable metrics for IT to measure are not “SOA adoption” but rather business-driven metrics such as improvement in time to service, improvement in service up-time, improvement in customer satisfaction, or more efficiency in IT or business processes and resource utilization.  This is not to say that IT won’t need to measure tactic and execution metrics.  These metrics, such as how long it takes to build a Web Service, how much re-use is occurring and how long it takes to implement a new technology, are key to ensure the IT project managers responsible for the service development, composite application development or infrastructure implementation are staying on track and meeting project objectives.  But the measure of SOA success is in its ability to enable IT to increase their value to the business.

A good example of this line of thinking is illustrated in a recently published IDC Business Value Assessment of an HP customer who achieved a 327% ROI by adopting SOA.  The key metrics pertained to time to service, decreased downtime and increased customer retention.   More about the value study can be found here.

So, my answer to “does SOA adoption matter?”  Yes, when it results in positive business outcomes.  It’s the means, not the end.