Today, I saw in Joe McKendrick’s blog summarizing the recent Forrester report on the “very much alive” status of SOA, the following lead paragraph:  

“A new Forrester Research survey of 2,227 IT executives finds that only one percent of current SOA adopters say they have received little or no benefit from the methodology — that’s right, only one percent. Sixty percent said they have seen some benefits.”  I’m assuming the other 39 percent are still waiting to see…but remain confident.

It’s a fact, SOA has hit mainstream adoption in IT.   Another supportive quote: 

“The survey, conducted while the global economy was in its recent trough (December 2008-February 2009), found that 75% of IT executives and technology decision-makers at Global 2000 organizations said they will be using SOA by the end of 2009.”

Why do you care?  If you’re not dealing with SOA today, you will be as SOA will be part of your IT melting pot of methodologies, software and capabilities brought in through upgrades of packaged applications re-architected to align with SOA, or through the integration of new partner capabilities through acquisition, collaboration or adoption of SaaS and the sizzling hot topic of Cloud services. 

As an example, at SAP’s annual user’s conference, Sapphire, held this past week, SAP CEO Leo Apotheker stressed ways that SAP’s software – the Business Suite and SAP BusinessObjects – can work together to enable better clarity and decision making in tough economic times and went on to make the statement that Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) will continue to be a critical element in enabling this vision, and in SAP’s product roadmap.  Read more in this Search SAP article here.  

That said, the most important statement of Joe McKendrick’s summary of Forrester’s analysis is the point made by Forrester’s John Rymer:

“SOA success requires organizational-level adoption, and the technical tooling is not at that level…. to get the big benefits, we have to start to invest not only in tooling, but also in the organization.”

I go back to the analogy that you can’t get SOA in a box.  If you are making an IT investment in learning and adopting SOA for new and modernized applications, more efficient infrastructure utilization, easier integration or some other aspect of gaining IT agility, it starts with the people.  The fundamentals needed for SOA adoption start with us -- an organizational willingness to change, a culture of sharing and trust, measures that reward embracing dependencies and re-use instead of a myopic focus on making schedule and budget at all costs, and the breaking down of incentives and implicit rewards that result in “not invented here” syndrome.  If you want to read more on this..  a detailed study in SOA best practices resulting from interviews of several HP customers who have seen success in SOA, written by IDC research, is on hp.com/go/SOA here.

The study summarizes it well:  “Creating an atmosphere of trust is crucial to nurturing any type of shared service and collaborative environment.  However, once these basics are addressed, it really all boils down to overall quality of service to gain acceptance to engage and depend on services built or provided by others.”

Technology matters but the people have to be willing to trust.  You can bring the SOA horse to water but only the organization can “make him drink”.