SOA panelists say corporate IT culture delays deployment

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- At the InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum on Thursday, the last session of the day entitled "SOA -- Reality Check" had a panel made up of IT managers with hands-on experience in deploying service-oriented architectures.

The panel, moderated by InfoWorld CTO Chad Dickerson, included Praveen Sharabu, director of enterprise architecture for CNF, one of the world's largest logistics companies; David Allen, CTO for Visa; and Toby Redshaw, CTO at Motorola.

Redshaw kicked off the discussion by saying that with all of its problems, SOAs reminded him most of Churchill's famous observation about governments: "Democracy is the absolute worst form of government except for all the others."

Redshaw said he believed the same could be said about SOAs as a form of technology.

At Motorola, Redshaw said the company's biggest challenge was taking a completely federalized, distributed "IT bowl of spaghetti" and moving it to a rapid, repeatable, component-based eco system.

At the end of the day, Redshaw said although SOAs are very "problematic," he expects it will become the killer app within the communications industry.

"Small and agile kills big and slow," Redshaw warned.

Keying off Redshaw's strong belief in the need to deploy SOAs, InfoWorld's Dickerson asked the panel if they agreed with Redshaw or was it possible that SOAs were just the current technology wave that would eventually disappear like so many other technologies that have come and gone.

Allen from Visa said SOAs are not going away because the problem they are trying to fix -- the fight to find reusable components -- will not go away.

"We had objects and thought that would do it. We use libraries and have gotten some utility out of that but not the promise we had heard," said Allen.

Allen also said that the real challenge at Visa is to inculcate everyone in IT in the philosophy of reuse. "Everybody builds for reuse and looks for reuse. That is the challenge," Allen said.

All the panelists agreed that the main barriers to acceptance of SOAs by senior management are cultural rather than technological. Sharubu from CNF noted that technology for technology's sake is not acceptable.

"There is always the question of justification," he said.

IT must have an answer when senior management asks what a new technology brings to the table and so at CNF, Sharubu said, his team never introduces a new technology unless it is in the context of a business issue.

Redshaw said at Motorola they take a slightly different approach, using what he called the "intervention change model."

In calling on the audience to adopt an intervention model within their companies, too, Redshaw said there are only a limited number of ways to make change happen in a company, the two main approaches being the selling or persuasive model  and the edict or the intervention model.

While persuasion is the most common within the enterprise, Redshaw claimed studies show that the intervention model is nine times more successful than the persuasion model.

"It is a top-down directive. You sell it and over-communicate it and you shoot people who go into debate mode," Redshaw said with a deadpan delivery.

"Shoot someone early so everybody gets the hint. Just a glancing blow; you don’t have to kill them," he continued.

Redshaw said companies should not tolerate dissent and they should emphasize speed of adoption.

Allen said with a smile that Redshaw's approach was admirable, but  it was not one that could work well at Visa, a company that "has no central point of control."

"There are too many stake holders to corral to go the top-down approach," he said.

But all the panelists appeared to agree that SOAs must be implemented, saying there is no other technique that will get enough new competitive services deployed fast enough. Visa's Allen seemed to speak for all of the panel members in expressing their belief in SOAs.

"There is no choice. If we don’t go there we will get killed," Allen said.