I’m shocked, absolutely shocked to find out that ”corporate software development in a state of dysfunction marked by budget woes, protracted project lengths, and dissatisfied end users.” Simply ubelievable.
In particular, I find it hard to digest that ”more than one-third of projects are abandoned after being implemented, and only 37 percent of finished projects met users’ needs.”
Of course, none of these numbers changed much since disks filled up whole rooms and blog posts were punched into cards, but still, it’s shocking to find out that this year’s industry average is the same as last year.
End sarcasm.
With that in mind (via Stefan Tilkov):
IT pros have expressed skepticism about SOA’s promised return on investment. A 2007 InformationWeek Web survey of 278 IT pros found that 32% of those using SOA said those projects fell short of expectations. Of those, 58% said their SOA projects introduced more complexity into their IT environments, and 30% said they cost more than expected. Out of all respondents using SOAs, just 10% said the results exceeded expectations.
Hold on a second. 32% fell below expectations. 10% surpassed expectations. It gets better:
InformationWeek’s survey results were confirmed in an August 2007 report by Nucleus Research, which found that only 37% of 106 organizations it surveyed actually were realizing ROI from their investments in SOA technology and programming.
Considering industry standard, that doesn’t look all that doomy or gloomy. It looks … just average. So what’s the big FAIL behind this InformationWeek article? SOA. The silver bullet to heal all ails? WOA.
Wait, but I’m a badge-wearing member of the of the RESTitecture police. Shouldn’t I be cheering any article that’s proposing an end to the unnecessarily complex WS-*?
Not if it’s lying with statistics.
From all my sources, it looks like SOA worked out as well as you can expect any good technology to work out. And I’m going to share a secret with you. Keep it private. REST is no silver bullet either. Five years from now, you’ll read the exact same article, only this time using the same failure rate and ROI, just blaming a different technology.
You can’t expect anything else. No technology will ever make up for unskilled developers, immature products, bad methodologies, unrealistic requirement documents and incompetent management. The industry average is average for a reason.
What will change is not the rate of success. What will change is the ability of the successful to do more interesting things, and do them better.
Fifty years ago we had to walk punchcard boxes from one room to another, now we trade messages with people on the other side of the globe. With spellchecking!
Back then we kept a rolodex with hand written scribbles and stapled business cards, today we have tools that update our rolodex in real time.
That’s where the change is. The possibilities you can realize.
What didn’t change is the industry average. And the average article using statistics out of context to make a point that sounds good but doesn’t say anything. There are other things horribly wrong with this article, but this one point stood out because, as fallacies go, it tends to propagate wide and far.
Chipping the web: August 15th from 17:31 to 18:06 — Chip’s Quips