A new global survey issued by Software AG suggests that enterprise adoption of service-oriented architecture (SOA) has ‘crossed the chasm’. Users also identified SOA governance as a key component of sustainable implementations with holistic, lifecycle approaches viewed as a core requirement. However, the overall maturity of their adoption was regarded as moderate with the state of their governance practices considered lacking.

According to the survey, more than 90% of respondents indicated some level of SOA planning underway within their organizations. More than half of all enterprises have already implemented successful SOA-based projects and/or an enterprise-wide SOA. Respondents also reported considerable satisfaction with their progress to date. Less than 10% were explicitly unhappy with their results so far as satisfaction with SOA beat dissatisfaction by a four-to-one margin. Among those reporting having an enterprise-wide SOA in place, approximately two-thirds said that they were satisfied with their results to date with the remainder reporting that it was “too early to tell”.

The survey also found that users overwhelmingly view governance as being a key component to creating sustainable SOA implementations at the enterprise level with over 90% reporting that it was either critically (54%) or moderately important. Despite this importance, nearly two-thirds rate their own SOA governance practices as either “non-existent” or “insufficient”. Among the best practices identified by the survey was the importance of having a SOA Competency Center or Center of Excellence in place to build cross-organizational support for these initiatives. Somewhat surprisingly, the survey also found that senior IT management appeared to be missing from these discussions with less than 20% enjoying active support from the Office of the CIO as just one example.

“With organizations just beginning to embrace SOA governance, a significant void exists in terms of well-established and widely disseminated best practices. The purpose of this survey was to overcome these gaps by determining which approaches are being used in the field to successfully implement SOA governance,” said Björn Brauel, vice president and Deputy CTO, Software AG. “These results show that it’s never too early to start in terms of governance, with a holistic, lifecycle approach to managing services most often needed. Reflecting the business-critical nature of most implementations, the need to consistently meet service-level agreements for performance was cited as the most common driver for SOA governance. Findings such as these can be invaluable to users struggling to define their own enterprises’ SOA governance strategy.”

Among the survey’s other findings were:

• Interest in SOA was widespread as only one industry out of 14 reported that more than 15% of its respondents had “no plans to adopt SOA”.
• Top drivers for SOA adoption were a desire to improve business agility, simplify integration, and support business process management (BPM) initiatives.
• SOA has yet to expand far beyond the firewall as only a small minority (19.5%) report having exposed more than a quarter of their existing services externally.
• There was a strong correlation between SOA maturity and governance adoption with more than 80% of enterprises having a fully-implemented SOA in place calling their governance practices “mature” or “adequate” versus 33% overall.
• Enterprises with the most advanced adoption of SOA governance were the least likely to identify governance as a set of technologies alone.
• Full lifecycle governance was deemed critical with 70% of respondents concluding that each stage of the lifecycle – design, run, and change-time governance – were of equal importance.
• Over half believe that governance should be implemented before the first service is created.
• SOAP and WSDL were described as the most important standards for SOA followed by UDDI.
• WSDLs and XML Schemas were the most commonly stored repository items followed by additional documentation and associated policies.
• In terms of key inhibitors to more widespread adoption, users identified the lack of needed skills, the complexity of their current IT environments, the lack of business support and the difficulty in quantify ROI as key challenges.

“The good news is that 91% recognize that governance is either critically or moderately important to their SOA strategy. The challenge is that only seven percent rate their governance practices as mature,” said Miko Matsumura, vice president and Deputy CTO, Software AG. “Enterprises have taken the first step in admitting that there is a problem. Now they can take the additional steps needed to address the issues highlighted by the report, such as overwhelming IT complexity, lack of business buy-in and a genuine skills shortage.”

The survey was conducted in April/May 2008 and received 176 qualified responses. Overall, the majority of the respondents were from large enterprises with revenue greater than $1B, with 37% coming from enterprises with annual revenue of $5B or greater. Responses were drawn from fourteen distinct industry sectors with no market representing more than 16% of the responses.

The full report, Best Practices for SOA Governance User Survey (July 2008), is available for download at www.SoftwareAG.com/soagovernancesurvey.