A CIO Needs to Know How to Find SOA or Find the Door
There's more to best practices than architecture. Perhaps the best practice in SOA is for the CIO to get involved and be a leader in making the business case for adoption of SOA?
Bloggers have also picked up on this conundrum. Joe McKendrick asked who should lead SOA initiatives: architects or analysts? David Linthicum asked if you should fire your CIO in order to get your SOA going (i.e., you need a CIO who gets it).
These blog posts and the Software AG study raise important questions about the role of the CIO in the success of the SOA project. Here are the issues as I see them, along with a forehead-slapping obvious answer.
- Any major project requires executive management involvement. Any! The involvement must be at the initial startup of the project, as well as ongoing for the lifecycle of the effort. Anything less and the project will likely fail.
- It's not about the technology. It's about the business. If the CIO doesn't understand that, a superior and less costly alternative to summary justice would be some education that gets them up to speed.
There's a story from IBM lore about chairman and CEO Thomas Watson Jr. dealing with a mid-level executive who just made a multi-million dollar mistake. The executive in question was told to report to the chairman's office. Watson asked if the individual knew why he'd been summoned. The manager assumed he was there to be fired. Watson's response: "Fire you? I just spent millions educating you."
I don't know if that story is true, but it certainly sums up the right attitude needed when considering the CIO's role in relation to SOA. If the CIO is not 100 percent behind the effort, then education is required—because ultimately, SOA should be initiated by the business in concert with technical management.
