Service oriented architecture (SOA) projects will fail
unless they are tightly managed and audited, Gartner has
warned.
Addressing an audience of 400 business users and IT heads at the
SAP World Tour event in Birmingham, Paola Malinverno, vice
president of research at Gartner warned that developers should not
be allowed to modify an SOA.
"Public enemy number one is when a developer makes changes to
services," instead of reusing code, Malinverno warned.
He said IT directors faced a challenge. "Reuse is not a benefit
of SOA but a hurdle that needs to be overcome in order to improve
business agility and lower software maintenance," the two main
benefits of an SOA.
"The main reason SOA projects fail is because there is a lack of
governance." He recommended that IT directors establish an IT
integration team to oversee the development of new services.
Malinverno also said that IT directors needed to rethink how a
programmer is incentivised. Rather than measuring programmer
productivity by the amount of code produced, Malinverno recommended
that IT directors put greater emphasis on reuse of web
services.
Such a tactic could improve the chances of a company's SOA
strategy being adopted, since programmers could be encouraged to
reuse existing web services which make up the SOA.
He also emphasised that an SOA was an architecture that needed
to support change and was not static. Organisations would have to
run impact analyses on early projects as and when services they
used were modified.
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