What You Want Your CIO to Know (Continued)

That leads to the much-repeated promises of SOA—loosely coupled services and flexible software leading to agile business processes. That's all well and good, but from a CIO's point of view, you want to be sure to highlight the business case. After all, this is an industry that sees hype around new technologies come and go like airplanes into O'Hare International. Fortunately, with SOA, there are plenty of real business benefits ahead.

Gauging the Business Returns
One key benefit to stress is the vision of reusing existing systems and data. At many companies, probably yours included, data is locked up in various systems that don't communicate well. The idea of software reuse is attractive to management because huge portions of IT budgets are typically tied up in simply maintaining existing systems, according to Peter Linkin, senior director of integration product marketing at BEA Systems. That leaves little to spend on new systems as business needs change.

"Much of the interest in SOA is coming from managers," Linkin said. "We've been hearing from customers for a while now that the great majority of budgets—70 to 90 percent—are tied up in maintaining existing systems."

On the other hand, you should stress to management that the benefits from an SOA probably won't be immediate. For most companies, the return on investment will be long-term, after you start to reuse services and data more efficiently. That's the real business reason to begin to work with SOA ideas now: to stay competitive long-term.

Industries moving first to SOAs are those that typically lead in IT—the financial services sector, for example, which tends to spend heavily on IT. The insurance industry, according to Ron Schmelzer of ZapThink, is also leading the charge. That's because huge insurance companies are often running expensive legacy systems. That makes them eager to adopt a cost-effective way to get at the business processes, data, and other valuable assets locked up in those systems. Legacy is thus "a sweet spot for this technology," according to Schmelzer. As those companies try to reuse existing investments to save money, he said, SOAs and Web services offer an obvious solution.

"There's a lot of good short-term ROI" on SOA efforts that integrate existing mainframe applications, portal structures, application servers, deployed business logic, and directory systems, Schmelzer said. And those projects can yield a fairly quick return—"in some cases, a few months."