Protecting SOA During the Recession

As of today, the general consensus of economists is that we're now in a recession.  So, it's probably a good time to reopen the discussion on ensuring that your SOA initiative survives the recession.

While we all know that SOA is about agility, it's probably a bit strange that I'm now telling you to never utter those words again inside your company - at least until we're out of the recession.  During a recession executives aren't thinking about agility, they are thinking about cost.

Now is the time to be positioning SOA infrastructure as instrumental to cost containment for the IT organization.  Consistency, avoiding duplication (notice I didn't say "reuse" even if that's what I was referring to), and consolidation are all instrumental to managing costs.  And SOA gives you these.

If you can, you should also position server and application consolidation initiatives, as well as storage and server virtualization as part of the umbrella SOA initiative, which you can talk about as focused on reducing waste at every layer of the infrastructure -- from storage, through servers, through applications, to business processes and services.  Elimination of duplication and sharing of common resources at every layer of the infrastructure is a message that is tailor made for a recession.

The parallels between concepts like application consolidation, server virtualization, storage virtualization and SOA are clear - in many ways they are the same thing, just at a different layers of IT.  Embrace this big picture as "SOA" and you can create a much more compelling picture of how SOA benefits the entire enterprise.

Is this a bastardization of what "SOA" means?  Perhaps, but the reality is that by aligning with these other initiatives, you can provide a more holistic picture to the CFO about the overall IT benefits that "SOA" is driving - ensuring that you protect your SOA initiative from getting put on the butcher block.

Of course, so far I've only talked about positioning SOA.  Next we have to talk about how the recession impacts your execution tactics.