Editorial from the January/February 2007 issue of Managing Automation

Noah's Ark II

by David R. Brousell, MA Editorial Staff

Let's say you are a manufacturing executive with operations in 30 different locations around the world. You are really beginning to believe that service-oriented software architectures, with their promise of connecting and processing information much better than in the past, are right for your corporate technology infrastructure going forward.

But you have two overriding concerns. One is that you are growing at a healthy rate but want to keep the number of captive operations at their current level and handle expansion through outsourcing. The second issue is that, as a company that has been around a long time and has grown through a fair number of acquisitions, your current technology infrastructure looks like Noah's Ark.

While you have implemented SAP as your company's backbone system, certain divisions still run J.D. Edwards, QAD, and several other ERP systems. You also have a collection of supply chain systems and even customer management systems. In the design area, don't ask. The heterogeneity is on the factory floor, too: some Rockwell, some Siemens, even some ABB systems in the Asian operations. You've got two or more of just about everything.

Now, you've heard a few sales pitches about SOA. In fact, you recently attended an SAP conference in Las Vegas entitled, "Delivering the Value of Enterprise SOA," to learn more. These architectures, you were told, are based on Internet technologies. That seemed good, sounded modern. But you are still unsure of how battle-tested they are, although you feel they are better suited for faster response and flexibility. They were also described as "open," but you've heard that before from the IT vendor community.

Even though you are still not sure whether SOAs will lower the cost of computing for your company — after all, there could be a lot of expensive change management to go with it — you are willing to put the price tag question aside for a moment. SOAs are coming at you whether you like it or not, so the bigger issue is whether all the SOA stuff is going to work, and, if so, according to whose rules.

On the issue of your business model going forward, the fact that you will be outsourcing more production as well as farming out other functions, like some design, means that you have to be pretty sure that your business ecosystem, the one you really care about, will have SOA interoperability. But you worry that the tech vendors are constructing SOA ecosystems that may not interoperate with those of their competitors. Because you suffer from Noah's Ark syndrome, that could be a problem in your company both internally and with partners new and old.

You worry about these questions: Will each vendor implement its SOA ecosystem differently? Will competition among them be shaped by this? Will SOA ecosystem wars erupt? What's to prevent such conflict, and will you be caught in the middle?

You have a lot of trust in the technological acumen of the vendors, particularly SAP. But you want to be assured that tech history warfare won't repeat itself while vendors are "crossing the chasm" into the SOA era, as SAP executive Shai Agassi put it at the conference.

In today's global manufacturing market, the last thing you need is a bigger Noah's Ark.

How are you planning for SOA? Share your trepidation, frustrations, or successes — write to me at Dbrousell@thomaspublishing.com.