SOA Projects In Crisis

Are you on Linkedin? I am. If you are, are you a member of the ZDNet Australia Group? You should be it's a good discussion community on all things tech headed up by Renai LeMay, Chris Duckett and Brian Haverty.I was really interested in this recent comment recent from Kevin McIsaac, "it seems SOA has been over-hyped (by middleware vendors like Oracle) many SOA projects are in crisis." and thought I'd respond.

It's a fair cop, guv. Yes, SOA has been over-hyped (by middleware vendors like Oracle)... and analysts and bloggers and industry commentators and many more folk besides. By the way, one thing I love about everything 2.0 is how we are all actually able to get through industry hype in a much more direct and meaningful way - ways like this in fact. And a couple or three things on SOA projects in crisis. I'm sure some are, but I would attest that it's not because they are SOA projects, it's because they projects. And there are projects in crisis in all aspects and all disciplines of our industry and others.

The key to avoiding failure is to stay faithful to certain principles of project governance that we have been able to identify based on our learnings from some of the many successful projects we have seen. Along with a few of my colleagues here at The Red Room we've riffed away recently about '10 Mistakes That Cause SOA Projects to Fail'. Some of the specific posts I would point you to are; this one from Anton Gouws on common project management pitfalls in SOA; Saul Cunningham writing about SOA as an architecture not a project; and one written by me on the value of simplicity.

And not all SOA projects are in crisis, here are some links to local customers that I know talking about their successful SOA projects - Greg Behrendt from Stanwell Corporation and Max Kennedy from Yarra Valley Water.

-Sean