News Desk

Day by day, company by company, IT organization by IT organization, today's enterprise is busy architecting for business-solution agility and the alignment of key assets around the emerging service-oriented architecture (SOA) umbrella. The ability to embrace SOA leads to the ability to rapidly capitalize on future IT investments and leverage existing technologies both inside and outside of your organization. Many organizations will struggle as they seek to identify, implement, and build on their first SOA forays into the new environment. This is unfortunate, because a number of best practices and lessons learned can be applied from the past and the growing SOA experience from technology providers and practitioners. As organizations work to extend IT capabilities utilizing SOA, many choose to implement a key first step: a pilot program, which enables the greater understanding and methodological deployment of Web services and SOA around a structured initiative.

The Pilot Program offers an expandable approach to SOA, and is a strong foundation for the larger blueprint of a business-driven architecture (BDA). You will find within the context of the following passages a concise understanding of the SOA reality and its application. Each organization will engage SOA differently and extract the greatest benefits based on its unique needs and its environment. Information and tools are the enablers that allow you to determine the best path. In the end, the SOA corridor to success or failure will be paved by the development of an overarching strategy and its deployment across the corporate domains of people, process, technology, and organizational requirements (see Figure 1).

Agility
IT agility is one of the main concerns for today's complex enterprises. Even the most well planned IT infrastructures face significant challenges introduced by mergers, acquisitions, and rapid growth of the enterprise. To increase efficiency, companies must phase out functional silos that incorporate overlapping and duplicate processes and add complexity to their IT infrastructure.

SOA provides the framework to re-architect IT infrastructure, eliminate redundancy, and accelerate project delivery via consolidation and reuse of services (often referred to as Web services). SOAs can adapt quickly to changing business needs, deliver new IT projects faster and at lower costs, and reduce ongoing IT administrative and infrastructure expenditures.

In an SOA, applications are not built as stand-alone, monolithic silos. Instead, business-relevant services (e.g., customer, ordering, inventory, etc.) are either built new or layered on top of existing applications. Then, project-specific application logic is built on top of the services in a separate architectural tier. This approach is what leads to the following benefits of SOA:

• By building services, they can be leveraged across multiple projects - thus reducing redundancy and avoiding the need to rebuild functionality in new projects. This helps deliver projects faster and lowers ongoing costs.
• By decoupling project-specific application logic from the services, it enables flexibility because this logic can be easily changed, updated, or even replaced to address new business needs - thus combining the underlying services in new ways without having to change or rewrite them. This leads to business agility as well as lower cost over time.

The benefits are compelling, but SOA also changes the dynamics of IT by introducing interdependencies across projects, applications, and even IT teams. Historically, allowing project teams to be autonomous drove accountability to the project teams and managed risk by limiting the external interactions. In contrast, the benefits of SOA are in many ways derived from external interactions (using services built by other project teams). These two worlds must be brought together without falling into the traps that exist at either extreme: a brittle, unreliable, and difficult-to-maintain spaghetti of application interconnections that can occur when project teams are left to build and use services without the right controls in place; or, at the other extreme, a central organization whose job is to connect applications together, which becomes a bottleneck for project teams, reduces accountability, and increases the risks to project success.

Because of the changes required and the unique pitfalls of SOA, before moving to this form of architecture, careful preplanning is essential. Your move to SOA is migratory and leverages existing applications that deliver value while building new applications and services. This generates a complex heterogeneous environment that avoids the "rip and replace" approach and focuses on building new services only when a new opportunity arises or when existing solutions do not deliver the necessary results.

Critical Pre-SOA Initiative Questions

1. How do we phase in and successfully manage the move to SOA within the current IT environment?
2. How do we leverage the existing IT infrastructure and investments in the SOA?
3. What procedures need to be established or modified?
4. Where will policy and security reside?
5. How do we explain the benefits of SOA and provide financial justification to the business stakeholders?
6. How does the move from silos to SOA impact our ability to detect and resolve problems?
7. Who owns shared applications or services and how do we allocate costs and budgets for these services?
8. What do we need to do to ensure our SOA scales from pilot to production? With thorough, up-front planning, a transition to SOA can be achieved efficiently and provide tangible benefits to the enterprise. The following passages will offer guidance in answering the questions listed above.

What Are the Overall Goals of the SOA Initiative?
It is important that you clearly understand and are able to articulate your organization's unique goals that will drive the move to an enterprise-wide SOA. Every enterprise SOA will be driven by unique business and technical goals - as well as by short-term and long-term goals. Understanding these up front will help you choose the right projects and help ensure the success of early implementations.

Critical Questions to Answer

1. What are your primary reasons for using SOA? (To reduce costs? Achieve better flexibility? Enable faster delivery? Improve customer satisfaction?)
2. What is driving your near-term use of SOA? (Connecting your core applications? Integrating with your partners? Providing a single view for customers and/or users? Getting real-time business metrics? Regulatory compliance?)
3. What is the long-term potential for SOA in your organization? (Faster product introductions? Flexible outsourcing? Business process flexibility? Stricter governance? Other?)

Possible SOA Goals
Operational Efficiencies

• Reducing infrastructure and management costs
• Improving end-to-end process visibility, security, and/or control
• Streamlining root cause analysis and automating triage

Business Efficiencies

• Accelerating time to market of critical business applications and processes
• Enabling easier compliance with policies (security, business, regulatory) from all functional areas
• Maintaining business continuity across the enterprise through real-time response to security, performance, or availability breaches
• Seeing business metrics in real time Development Efficiencies
• Increasing service reuse and reducing development costs
• Reducing time to deployment of new services