Education Key To SOA Success

We have the results of two surveys from SOA Pipeline for you this week. The first one asked, why consider implementing an SOA? Not surprisingly, more than half of you (53 percent) said you were seeking to lower integration costs. After all, analysts report that the majority of IT budgets these days are going toward integration efforts, and an SOA does promise to enable easier connections between applications and data.Another 30 percent said that the main reason for implementing an SOA was to get the ability to reuse services; finally, 17 percent said they were doing so to give them faster project turnaround.

Our second survey inquired about the chief challenges of implementing an SOA. This one had a surprise in it: the No. 1 roadblock, according to 56 percent of you, was the need to educate people about SOA. Other recent surveys have said that concern about proliferating standards was the chief stumbling block to SOA nirvana, but in this particular one only 12 percent agreed with that statement. A full 20 percent were concerned about their ability to reuse standards; 8 percent cited worries about security; and 4 percent said they were concerned about the lack of internal processes.