Analyst and popular SOA blogger Joe McKendrick is conference chair for the ebizQ's conference, “SOA in Action – SOA Means Business,” a two-day virtual event scheduled for Oct. 28 and 29. He explained to IT Business Edge's Loraine Lawson the meaning of the conference's premise, "SOA Phase Two." Registration for the event is free and you can register at any time - even just before a presentation begins. Also, the conference will be recorded and archived for on-demand viewing.

Lawson: You are the conference chair and emcee for ebizQ's upcoming virtual conference, “SOA in Action.” In a recent post about that event, you said it's about SOA Phase II. What do you mean by that?

McKendrick: Phase Two is where SOA has moved out of the IT shops and is becoming part and practice with the business. We've just about gone as far as we can with working with standards and solutions, and it's time SOA began demonstrating what it can do for the business. And, I believe, it is working for the business. Gartner even says SOA is past the "Trough of Disillusionment" and is gradually rising up the "Slope of Enlightenment." That means we've gotten past all the hype and blow-out-of-proportion promises, and managers and professionals are rolling up their sleeves and figuring out how it can be applied to solving business problems.

Lawson: The conference is free, but people do have to dedicate valuable work time to attend it. What can they expect to get out of it, in terms of what's being discussed and maybe getting their own SOA issues addressed?
McKendrick: That's a good point. We're providing many of the experts and sessions that you would have to travel for at a two-day conference held in a city venue somewhere. We also have quite a stellar lineup of analysts, practitioners, and other experts who will be presenting the latest thinking behind SOA. Again, this Phase Two we talk about - where is it succeeding, and how is it working? We have, for example, Dan Risacher, the CIO of the U.S. Department of Defense, who will be talking about how SOA is being adopted within one of the world's largest organizations, and the lessons learned there. We also have analysts from Forrester and Gartner. There's also Mani Chandy of CalTech. Some of our ebizQ contributors, such as Dave Linthicum and Dion Hinchcliffe, will also be taking part.

Lawson: You've covered much of the debate over SOA. And you know much of it has focused on what SOA “should be” or how SOA “should” be done, but when you look at the reality, where do you think SOA is now, in terms of defining it and in terms of whether it's a business or IT initiative?
McKendrick:  SOA is reaching the point where it's becoming part of everything we do -- writing applications, installing packaged applications, and integration work. It's almost becoming a given that there is going to be service-orientation built into our systems. And we're seeing that thinking moving forward into newer approaches such as cloud computing and Enterprise Web 2.0. After all, isn't cloud computing about the delivery of services?

I have a continuum, a maturity model if you will, that looks at SOA in terms of five stages. The first stage is basically under-the-radar stuff, various folks in the organization piloting or fiddling around with various IT and business services for one-off purposes.

The second is JBOWS, or Just a Bunch of Web Services, in which the light has gone on, and managers are saying, “Yes, we need SOA, and we have SOA going on now because we have 100 Web services.” Of course, many organizations that think they have SOA still have JBOWS because they don't have the proper governance or orchestration of the services. They're simply a lot of point-to-point implementations.

The next phase is GBOWS, or Governed Web Services, followed by what I'd call “SOA Lite,” meaning they have functioning SOA for certain business processes. The final stage is SOA Nirvana, which, like pure democracy, is more an ideal than reality.

At this time, most organizations are still in the JBOWS stage of the scale. But that's OK, because SOA is an evolution.

Lawson: An ongoing challenge with SOA has been demonstrating a return on investment. In your experience, what are companies that achieve an ROI doing differently than those that are not?
McKendrick: The companies that are seeing ROI are those that are doing a good job of measuring their progress. You don't have to have precise metrics, but it's a good idea to establish a baseline on what applications or projects are costing before an SOA initiative is under way, then go back and measure it six months, a year later to see what the difference has been.  The key is to measure what you're doing, so you can show management the difference an SOA approach has made.

Having said that, it's important to note that there's two stages of ROI that we'll be seeing. Early on, the ROI will come from easier wins, such as common interfaces or reusable services increasing developer productivity. Maybe it only took a month to automate a new process because the necessary services were already available and tested in the enterprise, versus a year of development time. That can be measured and documented. However, when we start talking about "business agility," where do you begin to measure that?  Increased profits, more customers? How exactly did SOA bring that? That's the long-term challenge of SOA ROI, and I'm not sure if companies have a handle on that yet.