Don’t forget the retrofit cost

The IT departments of many companies are creating web services. Interoperability makes it easy to connect an application to another. Often, however, these web services are created without any control.

Everybody knows that web service environment is not the same as SOA environment. Reuse, for instance, is frequently described as a benefit of SOA. But achieving reuse demands policies and tools to manage the whole service life-cycle. It´s necessary to implement SOA governance.

When the IT department faces this gap between a SOA environment and its web services environment, it realizes that the first step to solve the problem is to select a repository of services.

At this moment a new problem is detected. This kind of tool is built based on web services standards. Then, the IT people realize that its web services don’t follow the standards, they aren’t compatible with the tools and all of they must be changed. This implies in saying that an expansive retrofit in the web services must be made.

My conclusion is: if you don’t follow standards, don’t forget to include the retrofit cost in the ROI evaluation of new projects. Undoubtedly the retrofit will be necessary.