But so few companies have implemented a full-fledged SOA that ROI data for this camp is virtually nonexistent, said Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Mass.

Most of the information about ROI with Web services to date comes from money saved, not in new income generated, according to Harris and Bloomberg. Customers save because they don’t need to buy third-party middleware that was previously required to connect applications.

In the future, ZapThink’s Bloomberg said, the finances at the heart of Web services will become part of how SOAs are governed. To implement a successful SOA, IT will have to learn how to manage and cross traditional boundaries imposed by business units or IT organizations that work according to an operating system or a hardware platform. A major change involved with SOA is crossing these boundaries and thinking in terms of the service being provided to the customer or end user.

“Reorganizing IT to be truly service-oriented is really the hard part” of an SOA, Bloomberg said. The financial and ROI issues are pieces of the SOA governance question, and “there’s no quick fix for that,” he explained. “You need to establish enterprise-wide policies, and that’s essentially a business issue for each company to deal with individually.”

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