SOA succes in public sector

Posted in General, SOEA | Monday, June 12th, 2006 | Trackback

Before talking about success in the public sector it is necessary to take a brief look at what success is within the public sector – a question with different answers depending on who you ask.

A manager within the public sector success is typically based on the size of his/hers budget and/or number of staff. As SOA and EA potentially promises to reduce both of these, SOA is really not that appealing to public manager. As it will only reduce next years budget and number of personal it is not an appealing career move.

However what is happening in many governments is that the public tasks are not protected by the traditional organizational boundaries – as might have been. This means that different agencies potentially can take over tasks from other agencies if they can perform the same task cheaper – which for a manager in the public sector is a god career move! And where does SOA then fit into all this? As SOA is an architecture with a high reuse potential, SOA is the perfect to create a competitive edge in order to acquire task from other agencies.

In Denmark this is not commonly seen – yet! But it is my prediction that with the strong focus the Danish government has on EA and SOA it is only a matter of time before we see Danish public agencies “snatching” tasks from each other. The winner is going to bee the one who is best prepared – bear in mind that Denmark is a very small country, and from a IT perspective it makes little sense having multiple agencies solve tasks which are similar..

2 Responses to “SOA succes in public sector”

  1. Kristian Hjort-Madsen Says:
    June 13th, 2006 at 8:10 am

    Good point about the dynamics of public governance - but, do you really think that SOA will reduce next years budget and/or the number of employees? I have my doubts…

  2. site admin Says:
    June 13th, 2006 at 3:42 pm

    First, if you don’t have a business case don’t commence neither EA or SOA ;-)

    Secondly, my argument is that SOA and EA together should reduce the budget and/or number of employees – not SOA by itself. However it’s important to note that I am not talking about the IT-budget, but a possible reduction of the budget on an enterprise level. I hope you agree on this?

    What I see as really interesting is that the public sector is starting to move tasks to where it can be performed most efficient, and that SOA is a good architecture to achieve a synergy between existing and new tasks..

    /Rasmus

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