Beware the Trough of Disillusionment

or the Need for Governance

In their "Predicts 2007 : SOA Advances" (need to be a Gartner subscriber to access this material) Gartner analysts Yefim V. Natis, Massimo Pezzini, Roy W. Schulte & Kimihiko Iijima claim that SOA is approaching the "Trough of Disillusionment. (See my earlier entry on Gartner Hype Cycle).  This has some interesting implications for the industry.  To date we have heard lots in the press about how wonderful SOA is.  I am now seeing an increasing number of customers asking about how to apply SOA to their business, and most of the questions are around governance.  Customers want to know more about how they get the benefits and minimise their risk profile.

Governance is more a matter of procedures and policies than software tools, although the tools can help.  As we move forward the number of companies adopting SOA is set to increase dramatically (Gartner predict that in 2007 more than 50% of new mission critical applications and processes will use SOA, rising to 80% in 2010).  As market adoption of SOA increases then we can expect governance best practises to be more widely publicised and adopted.  Within Oracle a lot of our SOA focus in the last few months has been in publicising good governance practises.

Below are some podcasts that introduce some of the Oracle best practises.  There is now an increasing amount of material appearing on how to make SOA work, not just from Oracle and IBM but also from the big SIs like Cap and accenture.

So the be careful out there, and look out for that trough.

Podcasts: SOA Best Practices Roundtable Series
	Part 1: Meet the Experts (10 min.)		Part 5: SOA Planning (9 min.)
	Part 2: The SOA Life Cycle (8 min.)		Part 6: SOA Tools (10 min.)
	Part 3: Getting Started with SOA (8 min.)		Part 7: Q&A (11 min.)
	Part 4: The RIO of SOA (8 min.)