SOA Survey Overview: The Current State of SOA Governance

To get the practitioner's perspective on SOA adoption and governance, eBizQ conducted a SOA survey in August 2006. As organizations adopt a services-oriented architecture (SOA), SOA governance receives and increasing amount of attention. The resulting white paper discusses survey findings, SOA trends and recommendations for implementing effective governance practices.

SOA Survey Methodology:

The SOA survey was published online on the eBizQ website and was also promoted through its newsletters and email blasts. Respondents represented 313 companies in 21 industries. The top-five industries were technology, financial/banking, public sector/government, insurance, and healthcare/pharmaceutical.

SOA Survey: Key Findings

The SOA survey revealed that while most companies surveyed are doing something related to SOA, fewer than 20% have deployed more than 50 services in their SOA runtime environment. Other key results correlated with the fact that most companies are in the planning or beginning stages of SOA adoption. Specifically, while companies recognized that governance is a key issue, few have formalized SOA governance roles and 70% are enforcing SOA rules manually.

SOA Survey: Adoption Levels and Drivers

The survey first looked at companies' SOA adoption and deployment levels. These figures subsequently provided a baseline by which to judge findings on the implementation levels and methods of SOA governances.

While respondents were distributed across four stages—exploration, planning, pilot, and deployed—51% were in the early exploration and planning stages. Only 28% have their SOAs deployed, with only 19% having more than 50 services up and running in the SOA production environment.

For companies in all stages, SOA adoption is business-driven. Almost 64% want to increase business agility while 57.5% want to pursue IT reuse and 54.5% are seeking business process optimization.

However, because companies are still in early SOA adoption stages, the majority of services deployed are for internal use. In fact, the majority—59%--had only 0-to-10% of their services exposed externally. Industries with the most advanced SOA levels, based on the number of SOA services in production, are financial/banking, insurance, technology, and telecommunications.

For More Information on the ebizQ SOA Survey Results on Adoption

For more detailed SOA survey findings on adoption levels and drivers, download: The Current State of SOA Governance: An ebizQ White Paper.