Does SOA Rate a Mention in the Strategic Plan?

I was asked to draft a contribution to the IT Strategic Plan last week. My organization is a big public organization and the IT Strategic Plan is a glossy public document that has to be more of a marketing document than a technical plan. I wanted to put something in about SOA but I could not rely on reaching a technical readership or a readership that new much about the organization's IT at all.

This raised my curiosity. How many organizations actually put something about SOA in their IT strategic plan, let alone a corporate strategic plan?

Many commentators suggest SOA is a strategic imperative. For instance David Linthicum suggests "when thinking about SOA a long term strategic plan is best". Christopher Koch goes further and suggests that IT will assume responsibility for business innovation.

The ongoing shift to service-oriented architecture (SOA) will improve IT’s
ability to innovate because it requires that IT understand how the business does
its work. SOA represents the highest order of business process innovation

Surely SOA is of such central importance that it is going to be central to most IT Strategic Plans.

If I look to Forrester Research for some help with the IT Strategic plan I am advised that

IT's strategic plan is an essential tool to run IT like a business. The strategic plan for today's IT is different from the strategic plans that IT may have developed five years ago. It is purpose-driven and a complement to IT governance structures and processes.

Unfortunately SOA does not rate a menton in this article. Enterprise Architecture and Project Portfolio Management however bother get a Guernsey.

I spent some time with Google and found no strategic plans containing SOA and so I decided to look at some IT Strategic plans. Some of the findings are detailed at the end of this posting.

I found four IT strategic plans that put SOA as fairly a central goal or support for the plan. I found four where there was a mention of SOA but not a significant emphasis on it. After not finding as many as I had hoped I thought that perhaps when people write about SOA for the consumption of the layman they use other terms to make the document more accessible. So I looked for mention of 'agility' or 'reuse' in IT Strategic Plans. This I thought is a way for IT people to speak in code about SOA without mentioning those three letters. I found four of those too, although the connection with SOA was not all that obvious in these documents. I have listed nine IT Strategic plans with no mention or allusion to SOA.

This is not a thorough or unbiased study. The people publishing the plans on the web seem to be government and tertiary education groups. This happens to be my interest. The list is not a random sample and I could have missed some important references within the documents, however I have to conclude that SOA is not getting into as many IT Strategic plans as it should, given its strategic importance.

I am left to hypothesize on the reasons for this:

• SOA is not strategically that important
• SOA is only considered a software development issue and is not considered to relate to other IT issues infrastructure, support services or IT procurement
• SOA is too hard to explain to the non-IT person
• SOA is not as business-centric as some SOA authors would have us believe
• SOA is too new to warrant mention in an IT strategic plan
• SOA is too old and like RDBMS everyone accepts it and will move on without having to bring it up in a strategic plan
• The SOA message has not reached those who write IT strategic plans
• There is little marketing value in SOA

This is a reality check for those espousing the strategic importance of SOA but I would not go as far as those who suggest SOA is only for tactical purposes. Whatever the reasons, I will still push for it to be accepted at the strategic level.

In my contribution to my organization's IT Strategic Plan I started with a business definition such as one of the earlier definitions discuss in my earlier postings on the definition of SOA.

I then went through some for the motivations behind SOA and expanded on some of these in reference to the business of my organization. These motivations were Agility; Reuse; Assist Transition from Legacy; Federation; Extensibility; Manage incremental Change; Better alignment between IT and Business Processes; Intrinsic Interoperability; and Vendor Diversity.

This ended up a fairly long description, so I expect most of what I wrote will end up being cut by the editor of the strategic plan. Whether SOA gets edited out of the IT strategic plan is not important as long as the internal focus is on getting the pieces in place to make SOA happen and we can get some support from the business for this. Perhaps in this process I will encounter some of the reasons that SOA is not so prevelant in strategic plans.


IT Strategic Plans with SOA as central or a core goal

Oxford University, UK:
http://www.ict.ox.ac.uk/strategy/plan/plan.xml.ID=S4

The Global Justice Information Sharing Initiative (Global) Advisory Committee
(GAC) (an advisory body to the Assistant Attorney General, Office of
Justice Programs (OJP), and the U.S. Attorney General)
http://www.it.ojp.gov/documents/200409_GAC_Strategic_Plan.pdf

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts
http://www.mass.gov/Aitd/docs/itdstrategicplan.doc

SURF (A Nederlands higher education foundation) http://www.surffoundation.nl/eng/download/SURF-Strategic-Plan_2007-2010.pdf

IT Strategic Plans where SOA rates a minor mention

Carnegie-Mellon University
http://www.cmu.edu/computing/about/2006StrategicPlan.pdf

State of Texas Department of Information Resources
http://www.dir.state.tx.us/pubs/asp2006/asp2006_abbreviations.htm

The University of Western Australia, Library
http://www.library.uwa.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/11068/Scanning_the_environment_2007_NE.pdf

National Labor Relations Board, USA
http://www.nlrb.gov/nlrb/shared_files/reports/FY2007_StrategicPlan_FINAL.pdf

IT Strategic Plans with Some mention of Agility and Reuse but not SOA

State of Wisconsin:
http://enterprise.state.wi.us/home/StratPlan/enterpriseITplan.pdf

Commonwealth of Virginia
http://www.vita.virginia.gov/uploadedFiles/Library/StakeholderWorkshopResults.pdf

University of Iowa:
http://cio.uiowa.edu/strategicplan/

Department of Family and Community Services, Australia
http://www.facsia.gov.au/internet/facsinternet.nsf/via/ict/$file/FaCS_ICT_Strategic_Plan_2004-07.pdf

IT Strategic Plans where SOA rates no mention
(There actually were many but these are examples)

City of Winston-Salem:
http://www.cityofws.org/Assets/CityOfWS/Documents/forms%20and%20reports/Information%20Systems/IT%20Strategic%20Plan.pdf

State of Maine:
http://www.maine.gov/oit/strategic/SITP.doc

US State Department:
http://www.state.gov/m/irm/rls/c13461.htm

Louisiana State University:
http://www.lsu.edu/departments/its/ocio/FITS/fits.html

State of South Carolina:
http://www.cio.sc.gov/ITPlanning/StateStrategicPlan.pdf

New York State:
http://www.cio.state.ny.us/NYS%20IT%20Strategic%20Plan/NYSITStrategicPlan_20Jun2006.pdf

OHIO State University
http://cio.osu.edu/planit/refresh07.html

Dept of Justice, State of Victoria, Australia
http://www.justice.vic.gov.au/wps/wcm/connect/DOJ+Internet/Home/About+Us/Our+Goals/JUSTICE+-+Department+of+Justice+-+Information+Technology+Strategic+Plan+2002-05

Electoral Commission of Qld, Australia
http://www.ecq.qld.gov.au/data/portal/00000005/content/60401001035252002415.pdf