Joe McKendrick has a good take on the report over at his ZDNet blog and outlines the current state of the state with regard to SOA. As Forrester points out, SOA success requires organizational-level adoption. Hell it requires some leadership.

But I tend to think that organizational-level adoption isn't just about SOA. Adoption of any new technology - or any new way of doing something (as is the case with SOA) - comes down to the company culture. 

I can't be the only one who believes that it's culture and not technology that holds back any big IT project. C'mon, it's not as if IT shops are lacking options when it comes to product choices. And they don't call it shelfware for nothing.

In order for any significant IT initiative to succeed it requires a shift in the company culture. This doesn't mean you have to hire a bunch of change management consultants and go through a big rigamarole just to get the IT staff to use a new technology. Clearly that isn't going to happen in this economy if it ever made sense to begin with. It simply means you need to build in a learning curve when you map out the timetable associated with the expected ROI. From there, you prioritize the use of the technology in terms of rewards, performance reviews, etc. 

Of course a bigger initiative, like SOA, may require some brown bag educational lunches and shorter milestone rewards but it will lead to faster adoption. This, as you can guess, will accelerate returns on the investment. Bigger bang, bigger rewards.

I suspect that these points are probably familiar to anybody who's taken a Solutions Selling course or is trained in consultative sales. We've all heard the old adage that people buy from people, not companies. Yet people adopt new technologies based on value, relevance to their job and peer approval -- which is reinforced by culture in the end.

This is no easy feat as the cultural acceptance of a new technology can be more challenging than getting the contract signed after a lengthy nine-month sales cycle. However, it can also be the differentiator when it comes to real ROI and systemic IT advantage.


-Jeff

What I find most interesting of the lot is the new WebSphere CloudBurst appliance for managing private clouds and the new products around rules, optimization and virtualization from last year'sILOG acquisition. Frankly, it's a challenge to keep track of the hundreds of products in the IBM middleware portfolio but what the IMPACT announcements really get at is the need for architects and developers to address the challenges associated with sustaining the infrastructure.

Speaking very clearly about the value of SOA, Joe McKendrick aptly reported on IBM's Steve Mills who laid down the gauntlet and challenged the audience to find him a company not interested in SOA principles.

Of course, when you attend a conference like IMPACT, you tend to expect announcements about new products, bold statements from the executives and shots from the competition (like the recentWebSphere challenge issued by Microsoft). 

What I didn't expect to find among the sea of people were the lines of architects and developers waiting to take various certification tests. The lines were so deep you'd almost think Billy Crystal was administering the tests. 

IBM offered certifications in WebSphere, SOA and XML and the folks over at ZapThink offered aSOA for Managers Certification Course. When you think about it, the interest makes sense. After all, these events really should be about the folks who actually use the technology to do their jobs.

Now you could argue that the lines are sign of the times as IT professionals beef up their resumes with additional certifications. 

Though as I've mentioned before in this blog, regardless of the marketing term du jour (SOA, cloud, virtualization, etc.) IT professionals who have a mastery of the way that the architecture can reduce costs as well as the skills to execute on the strategy will always be in demand, regardless of the way the economy turns.

As for IMPACT 2010, there's already some buzz about it...

-Jeff