Butler Group, the IT research and advisory firm has said that despite all the noise about Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) being a revolutionary architectural strategy, there are still many aspects of the approach that organizations don’t fully understand.

In its report "Planning and Implementing SOA" the firm said that though SOA is not yet the predominant operating model for many organizations, there are a growing number of companies that are beginning to try the approach, especially larger enterprises in the Technology and Financial Services sectors.

"The adoption of SOA has significant potential to improve the value organizations derive from their IT investments, in terms of increased flexibility, improved use of assets, alignment with business objectives, and reduced integration costs", says Mike Thompson, Business Process Management (BPM) Practice director and co-author of the study."

While still mainly in the proof-of-concept or pilot phase at many organizations, the adoption of SOA is continuing to gain momentum despite the challenges. A Butler Group survey of IT decision-makers identified that 8% had deployed SOA in a live environment, with a further 17% engaged in trials, and 36% in the process of evaluating the approach.

However, the road to SOA heaven is not that easy.  A major hurdle in the process is lack of in-house expertise that businesses have to face often. Early adopters have also encountered problems around security, service performance, reliability, and data management.

Security is a particular concern, especially as the IT function has spent a large amount of time, effort, and money on tackling security issues, and there are concerns that SOA might open up new gaps within the implemented systems. Simply restricting access to authorized personnel via standard access control mechanisms becomes impracticable in a service-oriented environment, and new standards are starting to evolve.

The IT manager must start to prepare the IT infrastructure for these changes, and in particular for the performance demands of SOA. The move to a layered, services-based environment means that flexibility becomes much more important, as does the ability to meet variable performance requirements. It is important that, in tandem with SOA adoption, the IT infrastructure is enhanced to cater for these new requirements, along with the provision of common infrastructure services," added Thompson.

The firm said that a successful SOA implementation requires a collaborative effort between the IT department and the rest of the organization and businesses will have to have faith in their IT personnel if they want to get to the promised "SOA" land.