1. Mar 24th, 2007

    Faith-based IT and Snake-Oil Architecture

    snakeoil_1.jpg

    Matthew King brought an interesting quote from an IT World article I linked to in Rounded Corners 115:

    “Either you believe in the value proposition or you do not.”

    Last week (Rounded Corners 113) I came across two articles on SOA. I wrote a post about both, and then trimmed it down to just one mention. I felt it was too snarky, even for me. (You can quote me on that)

    I’ll spare you the shameful links, but the premise of both articles was the same. SOA rocks. You just know it. The ROI is elusive, but don’t mind that. All you got to do is believe in the business benefit at the end of the rainbow.
    Since when is IT a faith-based religion?

    Stick your head through the corporate firewall and look at the Web. What do you see? It’s services all the way down. Every mashup, every widget and MySpace page. Every geocoding of Flickr photos, or plotting real estate prices against a Google Map. Every eco-system of services around a Twitter or a BaseCamp.

    It’s cool. But more than that, it’s quick and easy. Itch scratchers are doing it on a budget that’s less than what you paid to buy SOA Practices to your key developers.

    If there is an ROI, you’ll see it. That you can believe.

    So maybe there’s no benefit from building and composing services to your business. Maybe your corporate culture conflicts with collaboration and reuse. Maybe the implementation is wrong. Maybe the benefits all disappeared due to the choice of technology. Maybe there’s visibility into the issue at the CxO level, just not a lot of action.

    Either way, doing more of the same will not make ROI fall from the sky. Either you see it, or you bought into a piece of Snake-Oil Architecture. IT is not about faith, and business results are not implementation details.

    Posted by Assaf Filed in general

    1. Mar 26th, 2007

      Monkeyget

      So you suggest that things should be bought based on their relative merits? What next? Actually knowing what it is you’re buying? Or maybe asking your developers, the one who will end up implementing the thing, what they think? Don’t be ridiculous.
      What is wrong with you? Do you want the demise of the buzzword based marketing and the consulting business? There is a whole economy which depends on it. You’re not an anti economy commie, are you?

    2. Mar 26th, 2007

      Chipping the web - par for the course — Chip’s Quips

      [...] Assaf: Since when is IT a faith-based religion? [...]

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