ZapThink’s Ron Schmelzer also was able to pry himself away from CNBC for a few moments during the recent financial panic and provide some thoughtful insights on how SOA can deliver the agility and streamlining they’ll need to not only get through tough economic times, but also prevail in the long run.

As Ron put it:

Businesses often go through a dysfunctional, schizophrenic sort of decision-making that seems to continuously put them at a disadvantage. When times are going great, companies are focused on rapid growth. There’s so much money to throw around that there’s little reason to be focused on efficiency and the longer-term efforts of enterprise architecture. From this perspective, businesses reason that they don’t have time to get things right, but rather have time to do things over. Then, the inevitable happens, and the economy cools, customer demand slackens, and belts tighten. Now, there’s no money left to invest in growth and agility. Rather, money must be spent on the inefficient operations because there’s no additional funds to invest to make things better. Damned if you do; damned if you don’t. It seems that enterprise architecture will perpetually get short shrift.

Ron says the time is now to invest in enterprise architecture. But not the long-term mega-projects that have characterized Big SOA. Rather, roll out SOA process by process – “focus on iterative, process-driven SOA efforts;” the quick wins. And, as Ron points out, “you won’t need to convince senior management to part with precious funds. Rather, you can simply offer the business to recover the costs by improving the business process and using those recovered funds to reinvest in the enterprise architecture, starting the cycle again.”

Read more at: ZDNet