Customer Relationship Management: Midsize Companies Have Fewer SOA Plans than Large Companies, but Need It More

According to a 2006 Forrester report by VP Randy Heffner, fewer midsize companies have enterprisewide plans for service-oriented architecture (SOA) than larger ones. The reason most often given, Heffner says, is that IT departments at midsize companies are too small to deploy formal enterprise architecture teams. But, paradoxically, an earlier 2005 Forrester survey reported that 44 percent of small and midsize companies said that implementing an SOA was a high or critical priority.

It seems that many small and midsize enterprises are too small to embark on an SOA implementation but too large to move the enterprise in a common direction without one.

Scott Sullivan, VP of IT and services at mid-market transportation company Pitt Ohio Express, is, like many of his colleagues, stuck in the middle. Sullivan doesn’t have a formal architecture team and has no immediate plans for moving to an SOA environment “since we’re running software that has been built over the years and don’t have the need at this time to look at a different architecture,” he says. But, he continues, “It is something we will consider as we move forward depending on the nature of the work and how the approach will fit into our overall environment.”

Which qualifies as a definite maybe.