Lustratus LiteBytes

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I just saw a piece by Zap Think that really got under my skin.

The article says

What ZapThink is finding is that the primary barriers to SOA adoption do not come from business management, which by and large realize the benefits of an agile, reusable, and loosely coupled architecture (even if they don’t call it that), but rather from within the IT organization

This lead-in comment is way off the mark in my experience. At one level, if you ask a business exec whether she sees benefits in an agile, reusable, loosely-coupled architecture, the first problem will be a completely blank look. But if you then translate that to an IT system that enables business agility, reduces ongoing costs, is flexible to new solutions and lowers operational risk, the business exec will naturally agree. This is just stating the obvious.

So the article then states that, in Zap Think’s view, an organization’s IT department is the single biggest obstacle in the movement to SOA.

This view makes the incorrect assumption that, just because the business side of the house is convinced of the need for agility, etc, that removes them as a barrier to SOA. If you changed the above question to be more realistic, and ask whether the business exec is prepared to make a substantial investment into a new technology which may take some considerable time to break even but which will in the long run enable business to be more agile, flexible, efficient, lower risk, etc, then there is likely to be a series of considerably detailed and lengthy discussions. Many companies today are keen to get to the benefits promised by SOA, but find resistance on the investment front when it comes down to asking for a new budget. After all, the platitudes surrounding SOA have been used for 20 years on business execs, so they can be forgiven for having grown rather cautious, and desirous of looking for incremental investment where payback can be validated at each stage.

It would be a dreamworld if wanting the benefits and agreeing to invest were the same thing…

Steve

Welcome to the brand new LiteBytes weblog from a brand new analyst firm Illuminatus Research!

You may wonder whether the world needs another analyst firm and we would like to take a few minutes explaining why we decided to do this. But before that we would like to explain why this blog is going to be a little different…

First off both of us (Steve Craggs and Ronan Bradley) will write blog items here – which may be a little unusual. However, what is really different though is that we intend LiteBytes to be a forum rather than simply a soapbox: A forum for open discussion between the two of us and anybody who wants to join in through comments or occasional guest pieces. Apart from being hopefully more entertaining than the backslapping and promotion typical of many corporate blogs these days, we believe that this format will help our readers understand how we came to our conclusions and help us by engaging our readers in real debate.

Moving to why we are here at all… Both of us have been in the software industry for a long time combining technical with operational management roles as well as writing and speaking about software and technology trends. As we have both run software businesses we understand the technology, but as we have both run businesses we also know what matters in technology decisions. What we both saw an opportunity to fill two gaps in the analyst world:

• A source for information which communicates deep technology in terms relevant to senior IT and business management.
• A firm focused on the problems faced by customers rather than products promoted by vendors.

And that is what Illuminatus Research is all about.

If you want to find out more about Illuminatus Research, check out www.IlluminatusResearch.com. Expect to find “cutting to the chase” analysis spanning everything from Service Oriented Architecture to Hierarchical Data Management to business technology issues – and to kick things off, there will be some free samples so that you can see what we are about.

Ronan & Steve