In this announcement the "Merlin Federal SOA Coalition," a consortium of SOA solution providers (aka, product vendors), announced the results of its "SOA What? - Who and What is Driving SOA Adoption in the Federal Government?" study. The survey was of 196 Information Technology (IT) decision makers in the Federal government.

"Indicators point to the fact that Federal IT professionals overwhelmingly support the SOA concept with 56 percent reporting they believe their agency would benefit from a SOA. Among those who have experienced a SOA implementation, 73 percent would recommend other agencies follow suit and adopt a SOA approach. Forty-nine percent of respondents have heard of SOA. That said, when quizzed, 70 percent of those aware of SOA chose the correct definition and business value proposition. Seventeen percent of respondents note SOA implementation experience at their agency - 11 percent have completed the process while 62 percent of projects are currently in design, planning, and deployment phases. Against this backdrop, only 22 percent note participating in a successful implementation that met the project's identified goals - 78 percent note partial or no success."

First of all, "SOA What?" means it's time to get some new marketing people. I would say: "SOA you're fired." That's almost as bad as "Flying in the face of SOA." But, not as bad as "SOA 2.0."

Second, not sure there is anything interesting here, other than the government IT guys, like the rest of the world, are moving towards SOA.

The fact of the matter is the US government is very interested in any concept that will fix their core IT architectures, which were built over many years of procurement cycles and thus, have many layers of complexity and are about as agile as a pile or rocks. I've seen them first hand in my travels over the last few years, and let me tell you the IT architectures in place are down right scary.

So, SOA to the rescue? Sure, why not? However, there needs to be an understanding that a bunch of products, such as those mentioned in the "SOA Coalition" won't provide as much of a benefit as a detailed set of planning steps to move from a dysfunctional state to something that resembles an efficient architecture. Therefore, the additions of governance systems, BPEL engines, or whatever, will only add to the complexity...if not a part of a larger more strategic SOA journey (notice I did not say project).

I think that the government can benefit most from SOA considering the nature of their business and the underlying need to have many systems interoperate. However, there needs to be a realistic understanding of the issues at hand, and perhaps they need some new approaches other than building architectures that look like archeological layers of past IT contracts. I do think some of the more spectacular SOA successes will come from the government side.

Posted by Dave Linthicum on September 27, 2006 04:56 AM