Section 7.2. What challenges do companies face in adopting ESA?

7.2. What challenges do companies face in adopting ESA?

The biggest challenge any enterprise faces in moving to ESA is the pastthe enterprise's own past, that is. This past often weighs down the present in the quite tangible form of legacy applications and layers of IT infrastructure. Due to various mergers and acquisitions, not to mention the decentralized IT purchasing that may have taken place in years pastdepartmental computing, data marts, and so forthit's not uncommon for today's large corporation to find itself running a dozen Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) systems, and perhaps at least that many Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. Generally, such corporations conceived, designed, and implemented these systems without the slightest knowledge or forethought of web services, enterprise services, or composite applications. Yet that doesn't mean they must be excluded from the new service-oriented IT landscape. It just takes a little extra thinking to meld them into a new architecture that's based on enterprise services.

The move from old to newfrom understanding and managing IT as a collection of isolated, stovepipe applications, each one a realm unto itself, to running IT as an array of service components that can be snapped together like so many building blockscannot be achieved overnight. It requires careful and methodical planning.

There is another problem, too. Many people involved in IT for several years now have recognized the great potential of web services. Web services promise to help make it easier to connect disparate systems, the common wisdom holds, and all that's needed is to impose a few technical standards and this Linux-based system running Vendor X's database will soon be chatting away with that Windows-based system running Vendor Y's database. If only it were that easy. Without the right planning and architecture, the great potential of web services technology will be dissipated and lost as these IT-level services are created in a vacuum and with no foresight into how they might support and become vital elements of a comprehensive, enterprisewide service architecture.