down the risks and respects the need for reliability.
In the end, the company must have systems that will work dependably. And an SOAbased environment that is not functionally rich is a failure. In that case, Peachtree would be better off with a monolithic system. Because the stakes are so high, the company must err on the side of getting the job done, and only then bring along the flexible systems and architecture. It doesn’t do any good to have a totally flexible architecture that either doesn’t properly address business needs or takes so long to implement that the company misses opportunities in the meantime.
For an organization like Peachtree, I don’t think there’s a time penalty for either choice— it wouldn’t take any longer to get SOA up and running than it would the monolithic system.
But it’s important to remember that people often start out thinking of SOA as a project.
Done correctly, the “project” never ends—it just turns into the way you do business. It becomes the way your IT capability is built, and that represents long-term value.
Candace should recommend that Peachtree turn toward an incremental implementation of SOA. And my strong advice to Max is to accept
Candace’s recommendation. The question of how to replace which pieces of the infrastructure should come in at a distant second to the overall decision to adopt SOA. Peachtree should follow the commonsense approach of retaining what still works and adds value to the