By Stephen Swoyer
A recent study from market watcher Gartner Inc. suggests that in some cases SOA adopters might be service-enabling chiefly for the sake of service-enabling.
In approximately 40 percent of cases, Gartner said, adopters don't make any attempt to quantify the results of their SOA implementations. One reason for this, according to the firm, is that shops are pursuing SOA strategies without first identifying the business benefits of doing so. This also explains why a number of shops aren't moving to SOA; fully half of non-SOA users say that they can't make a business case for adopting SOA.
"Many companies come to SOA with excessive expectations, such as immediately achieving quicker project cycles, but users often are not aware of the efforts, resources and time needed to achieve these benefits," said Massimo Pezzini, research vice president and fellow at Gartner, in a statement. "Consequently, some SOA projects are perceived to have failed when, in fact, there are simply no well-established metrics to evaluate success. Therefore, sometimes the benefits are there, but people keep arguing how much better things are, and whether any improvement is really linked to SOA.
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