Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) deployments these days, undergo a considerable amount of scrutiny, considering there"s no real way of measuring Return On Investments (ROI), with this kind of an initiative.

However, although direct returns might appear to be very little, the truth is quite the contrary. Biztech 2.0 spoke to Asheesh Raina, principal analyst, Software Industry, Asia Pacific, Gartner, to get a clearer picture with regards to measuring ROI of a SOA deployment.

Is there some sort of a direct benefit that enterprises gain as a result of a SOA deployment?

There are direct benefits of SOA but they are gradual in nature and become visible once the architecture becomes stable in an organisation. As part of a SOA deployment, enterprises can expect benefits such as improved business agility (leading to improved revenues); re-use of existing system and business knowledge; evasion of duplication of systems, applications and business processes of the organisations; and faster time to market and customer satisfaction.

How does one justify ROI for a SOA deployment, considering this isn"t a technology per say, but an architectural style?

In order to justify ROI, Gartner believes that organisations must carefully map their needs with respect to the benefits that SOA would accrue upon its deployment. There are various factors to justify ROI for a SOA deployment. ROI would involve moving from a project-based architecture to a flexible architecture; achieving separation by loose coupling of business and process logic; increased business and IT alignment through business services that represent business processes; re-usable architecture leading to quick adoption of changes in business model and thus faster time to market; and information availability and alignment through the entire organisation.

In order to add on to the ROI factor, what factors should be considered during a SOA implementation?

First and foremost, one must understand that a SOA initiative brings agility to business process rather than IT integration. An inventory of existing applications and services should be made in order to capture and enhance their re-use.

A SOA implementation should be carefully planned and mapped to the organisational needs and goals rather than aping open benchmarks. Over Engineering (trying to grab minute details) should be avoided as it leads to complexity, chaos and increased maintenance. The deployment should be incremental and should start in a phase-wise manner rather than going all out in one go.

What would be the right way of measuring ROI of a SOA deployment?

SOA delivers enterprise-wide benefits unlike traditional software projects, making ROI measurement little more complex than usual.

SOA ROI may not be directly measurable or quantifiable but the impact of successful deployment is far reaching and would percolate to various aspects of an organisation. These SOA projects are synonymous with continuous improvement and are incremental in nature.

The evident and visible measures could be when the organisation starts seeing business agility, reduction in time to market, and also the complexities.