SOA: Does it deliver its promised value?

Brian Orrell sent me a link to a David Chappell (the SOA expert, not the comedian) blog post titled “Is SOA Failing?”.  In his post, Chappell states plainly that the “value [of SOA] is nowhere near as large as we’d hoped.”  He goes further in a podcast by saying that “SOA is failing.”  Overall, Chappell delivered his usual dose of thought-provoking content and it was a solid message. Key points:

• SOA is failing because services are (often) not reusable
• The failure is largely human – technology can deliver, but humans struggle to design or consume services in that form
• SOA works better when it delivers highly-technical services (e.g. identity management) or when it delivers raw data

…and as a separate nugget, he included a distinction I had not thought about yet:

• SOA usually describes services consumed by technologies or developers
• SaaS describes consumer-facing services

I wholly agree with David Chappell:  SOA is limited in its ability to create value for an organization.  Recently, I spent time at a large non-profit organization creating services (and implementing MSE) to centralize user authentication & authorization for a number of .NET applications.  Our team developed and exposed new services so that applications could call into a central system for identity management.  We also used services to expose raw data: states, countries, members, etc.

The architecture worked well, but the value was elusive .  First, abstracting security logic from each application and centralizing it sounds simple, but in practice it was challenging to reuse identical logic for all applications.  A bigger limiter was that it took a substantial effort to train and transition the client staff from an “I need to build my own…” mindset to a “I need to go find…” mindset.  Arguably, there was significant value lost in translation.

SOA delivered a solution for our need, and the software is serving the organization well.  But, SOA did not deliver the enormous value that experts like Chappell once touted that it would.  SOA is useful, but I am not convinced that it is game-changing.

What do you think?  Is SOA failing?