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Where's the ROI?
A well-constructed SOA deployment can eliminate redundant systems, processes, and high maintenance costs and lower integration costs
by Chris Haddad

February 10, 2005

We are at a tipping point where concepts such as real-time enterprise and on-demand and network computing will provide increased productivity, efficiency, and revenue opportunities. Vendors are working to incorporate service-oriented architecture (SOA) concepts such as federation, service-interface descriptions, discovery, and loose coupling into their platform architecture. To create a net-centric computing environment today requires procurement of specialized components and changing development best practices to adopt an SOA mind-set.

Deploying SOA infrastructure provides a fabric used to interconnect all application portfolio assets and create a holistic architecture. Most organizations require a business case to evaluate whether to make the requisite investments, and stakeholders often struggle with constructing this financially oriented document. Building a flexible and responsive SOA foundation costs time, energy, and resources, but the investment is required for enterprises to gain advantage over the competition. Therefore, corporate executives, IT management, architects, and developers must work together to build SOA business plans that outline the benefits to the organization.

A critical part of the business case development process comes in understanding what supporting arguments upper management will or will not accept. IT managers are frequently told that soft costs or benefits are not considered when evaluating investment alternatives. Soft benefits are improvements that are difficult to quantify. However, the inclusion of soft benefits, or intangibles, can buttress the hard-dollar analysis and make the case even more compelling.

Examples of soft benefits include increased employee productivity, improved customer/partner service, and enhanced competitive standing. Hard benefits are quantifiable budget cuts based on reduced staffing levels as a result of making certain SOA investments. The description of intangible benefits should relate to a company's corporate objectives, IT strategic goals, or business unit strategic goals.

Business Benefits
Five categories of business benefits are applicable to SOA investments: improved user experience, cost savings, service life-cycle management, policy enforcement, and competitive advantage.

End users may be workforce members, partners, suppliers, or customers who desire access to business processes and information that crosses application, organization, and geographic boundaries. A frequent goal of SOA projects is to improve the end-user experience when interfacing with multiple, disparate systems. Workforce members can find information more effectively and efficiently when presented with customized views. Composite applications are used to aggregate content and data from multiple applications into a personalized view. Before composite applications, users were required to log on to each application and navigate between many, very different user interfaces to perform their tasks. With a composite application, users have an interface that provides a common look and feel, a single starting point to accomplish any task, streamlined workflow, and a single place of access to all relevant information.

Improved quality of experience (QoE), the perception of intuitive workflow, occurs as the enterprise tightens the integration between systems and addresses business process bottlenecks. By establishing end-to-end business processes, organizations can ensure that the systems interact in a cohesive and intuitive manner. QoE improvements can manifest themselves in several ways: increased customer retention, minimized errors, improved productivity, faster transaction response, and so on.

Workforces are increasingly mobile, heterogeneous, geographically diverse, and collaborative. SOA permits users to access business logic and information across multiple channels, platforms, and devices.