Replacing "Inflexible Inefficiency" with "Flexible Inefficiency"
I spoke at a federal government sponsored SOA governance workshop last week, and at this workshop an interesting side discussion arose around working within government bureaucracy that I think has bearing in the commercial world as well. One of the core issues with SOA adoption within large bureaucracies is that the incumbent decision-making and funding process is not tuned for the flexible needs of SOA. While this "inflexible inefficiency" is a particular challenge in government settings, it also applies to large commercial organizations.
An approach that has worked within at least one government organization is to establish small-scale joint initiatives funded partially by participants with a common interest and need, combined with seed money from a "change agent" focused on improving organizational flexibility. While this approach doesn't necessarily align with a strategic SOA initiative, it can be quite effective in seeding initial SOA successes into the organization. In effect, this approach replaces "inflexible inefficiency" with "flexible inefficiency" -- creating momentum from the bottom up with a set of tightly focused services that can be shared in an ad-hoc manner with other organizations. While the services that are produced from such efforts aren't necessarily the be all and end all to the broader organization, they are clearly valuable to the immediate initiative and they can be useful for other areas of the organization as well. As these services are picked up by other areas, interest in SOA increases and the opportunity can arise to begin addressing the organizational impediments to broader and more strategic SOA adoption.
If you are struggling with organizational process impediments to getting your SOA initiative started, consider an approach like this that can "fly under the radar" -- find some seed money and a group of motivated participants to quickly build out a proof point of the value of SOA. You can then use this success in your internal marketing efforts within the broader organization.
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