‘Cost kills initiative’ is a common occurrence in most of the IT departments. SOA being a newer technology has its own challenges and costs, so should SOA be treated like an investment, whose benefits of will be available at some point in future. The truth is SOA like any other evolution has its plus and minus and if properly planned and executed can be an effective cost cutting tool; before we get into that, let us look at how costs build up in an IT organization and how SOA can affect that.
Any initiative requires process, people and technology for its actualization. Process and technology again in turn require people to support it. The whole support chain leads to requirement of ‘Specialty Teams’ or ‘Center of Excellences’. Each such team is basically a cost center having equipment, office, power, communication, infrastructure and management costs. So the easiest way to cut costs is to reduce the number of the ‘Specialty Teams’. SOA is technology evolution of loosely coupling system using standards. The emphasis is on standards, leading to creation of ‘Specialty Teams’ which are aligned with industry and current trends and best of all could be shared across multiple initiatives, sharing being the second biggest benefit of SOA.
Also the ‘Specialty Teams’ need people with special skills meaning a specialist in that specific technology or process. On an average a specialist costs at least two times than a generalist who has similar experience but not the in-depth knowledge of that particular subject. Also generalists are easier to find than specialists. As SOA advocates standards the ‘Specialist Teams’ support technology and process which themselves are standards, thus replacing the need for an specific technology specialist with SOA technologist. For now SOA technologist are specialists, but with the adoption rate continuously going up pretty soon they will be considered as generalists, mush like Web Programmers, only a few years back they were considered specialists and hard to find.
The third biggest area where SOA helps in reducing cost is by promoting resource and infrastructure sharing, it work the same way as corporate having technology standards. As over a period of time more and more projects use same technology (SOA) they can use resources from a shared pool reducing the ‘Total Cost of Ownership’ across the projects. It is different story to get the first project to build that infrastructure in most of America as the cost and return on investment is calculated on per project basis, scaring away the any project manager from being the first project.
Probably the most touted and most understood cost benefit of SOA is in the way the applications and projects are designed and developed themselves, having reusable components, which can have their own lifecycle, leading to smaller, and more manageable, more reusable components.
Another not much discussed benefit of SOA is the loose coupling it provides between provider and consumer, which helps in changing the provider implementation without impacting the consumer. This has tremendous potential in terms of cost saving where changing or upgrading a provider implementation is a regular phenomenon.
Tags: Enterprise Architecture, SOA
