There is only one good way to approach the adoption and facilitation of SOA and Web services, and that is to establish, right from the beginning, a corporate Center of Excellence to guide the revolution from making a compelling business case to putting in place a long-term solution for measuring and improving on every success.
SOA Centers of Excellence:
Preserving Order Amid Change
S. E. Slack3/21/2008
A white paper exploring the value of a SOA Center of Excellence.Executive Summary
"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change,and to preserve change amid order."
-Alfred North Whitehead
When first entertaining the notion of a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), most informationtechnology (IT) professionals and business leaders rightly imagine the many benefits that theirorganizations will see in improved customer interaction, greater business agility, efficient assetreuse, and flexible growth options. Indeed, SOA is one of the bright lights of contemporary businessstrategy and, some would suggest, the inevitable technological outcome of our global, Web-centricworld. Some have gone so far as to call SOA a revolution, not just in technology but in how we thinkabout business infrastructure.
As with any revolution, the goals are lofty and the rewards are many-but so are the challengesand potential pitfalls. Even well-intentioned change, without governance, can lead to chaos.However, through good strategy and careful planning, the implementation of an effective SOAstrategy will not only reap anticipated benefits but can help your organization build a leadershipteam and decision-making process of lasting importance.
For some organizations, the best practices of the past will be a terrific starting point for the future.As with more-traditional IT-deployment cycles, the concepts of governance and standardization areat the heart of an effective SOA strategy. But because of SOA'smany complex business processes,technologies, vendor products, and shared integration needs, governance in this instance meansmuch more than a common set of specifications or a simple roadmap. It means bringing togethernew groups within the organization, helping those groups define common needs, giving them theresearch and migration tools they require, and challenging them to follow through well beyond thepurchase and initial deployment stages.
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The good news is that building an effective SOA Center of Excellence is not something you have todo alone.
Document published March 2008.Introduction: Staying Ahead of the CurveService-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the concept of integrating and reusing modular business services,or software components. SOA is a critical new piece of an organization's overall enterprise architecture;it's a method for bringing business and information technology (IT) together in a sort of neutral zone tocreate business-aligned IT services that can flexibly fulfill business processes and goals. For some people,it means new and exciting input into business practices. For others, it may feel like a loss of traditionalcontrol. But for all, it signals the beginning of a modular and more-agile approach to serving customerneeds and driving profitability.
The SOA approach is highly responsive because it focuses organizational efforts on the use of fewer,reusable applications that can be easily integrated and repurposed. This focus helps to standardizechanging business processes quickly, integrate disparate applications, and assemble services rapidly intonew, composite applications. In short, when business requirements change, the application architecturecan change right alongside them.
In comparison, legacy applications can become massive nightmares that are difficult to adapt inchanging economic and social environments. Their focus is traditionally on user interface requirementsrather than on reuse and integration of the application throughout the organization. When changes arerequired, extensive reso... [download for more]
