SOA and Enterprise Mashups - Work On Your Pitch

I read an article today on SeachSOA.com entitled; “Enterprise Mashups, SOA’s Killer App?” While I totally agree with the sentiment of the article (that business users could care less about SOA), I’m a bit surprised that this is a revelation to anyone. The bottom line is business users don’t care about technology for technology’s sake. They only care about the relevant and tangible solutions a technology delivers. And while we technologists know how SOA translates into shorter times to value and more agile systems, business users don’t want to hear pie in the sky promises. They want to see quick and powerful results.

Regardless of whether it’s ultimately enterprise mashups or some other by product of SOA, it’s incumbent upon those who introduce new technologies into an organization to be smart marketers. As smart marketers of technology, we should keep the following points in mind when trying to secure business user buy in:

1) Know your audience. All too often, technologists get caught up in the technical details that turn themselves on yet forget about the wants, desires and needs of the person whose appetite they seek to whet. The CFO and data entry manager have very different views of the world. Be mindful of these differences and tailor your pitch accordingly.

2) Sell Specific Benefits. While we technologies love to extol the virtues of agile systems and straight through processing, business people’s eyes tend to glaze over when we use such general terms. Find out what’s important to them and then discuss the technology within that context.

3) Don’t Oversell. Business users are a pretty skeptical bunch. They’ve been sold a bill of goods before and have been left holding the bag. SOA and enterprise mashups are pretty powerful concepts that don’t require hyperbole to get others excited as well. Keep your pitch relevant, specific and on point and the rest will follow. Don’t flip the Bozo bit.

Common sense, yes. Commonly performed practice by technologists…not so much.

When I first learned about SOA, it reminded of the first time I learned about ODBC (Open Database Connectivity). I thought to myself that embedding in my applications and reports the ability to hit virtually any data source regardless of vendor or platform was going to be a game changer for business users. However, I also knew that merely telling them about a software driver that enabled a programmer to access multiple databases via native programming language access calls would be greeted with cricket calls. The best way to generate enthusiasm was to show them the power of ODBC from within the report writers and Excel spreadsheets they already used. It’s one thing to tell a business user what a given technology will do for them, it’s another thing entirely when you can show them.

I remember one business manager saying to me after a demo; “…so you’re saying this ODBC thing allows me to run a report that accesses our daily sales from the field and inventory levels in our warehouse in real time using the tools I already know instead of waiting for a weekly download and import. WOW!”.

SOA and enterprise mashups in one form or another will represent one of these WOW moments for business users if we present them in terms they understand and within a relevant and important context.