Five Ways to Make Your SOA Stronger

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November 15, 2006

Five Ways to Make Your SOA Stronger

SOA is a journey with many steps and many challenges. A new report in CIO Insight, however, does a good job of narrowing down the fundamentals to five key decision points in any enterprise SOA project. These points are based on the recommendations of CIOs and systems architects who have already built their first generation of SOA:

1) Retool the IT Department: Developers and IT professionals need to be retrained in SOA ways, and tech departments may need to be re-organized. "The services approach revolves around the creation of reusable software components—services—as opposed to monolithic applications. Developers schooled in traditional practices will need to learn to break down coding into smaller pieces."

Additional thoughts: The CIO Insight article does not mention incentives, but developers and IT professionals may need to be incentivized to move to reusable services -- in many cases, they are paid to generate code and monolithic applications, not to cut down and reuse services created and maintained by another part of the enterprise.

2) Establish an Oversight Group to Get Results: "An organization with hundreds (or thousands) of developers needs a common development approach to maintain consistency and interoperability among services. Developers in far-flung business units need to know what services exist. And reuse, as a policy, needs enforcement to make it a reality. A dedicated architecture group can make those things happen."

The old joke is that if you don't want something done, give it to a committee. However, SOA will not succeed with input and buy-in from across the enterprise. An oversight group -- comprised of both line-of-business managers and IT managers -- is the very core of SOA governance. There are many names for this type of body -- "Center of Excellence," "Governance Board," and "Steering Committee" are but a few of the names for such a group. But IT can't go it alone

3) Catalog Services to Enable Reuse: "As an organization grows its services portfolio, it will need a formal mechanism for keeping track of its software assets. SOA adopters should maintain a catalog of services [or registry] that developers can consult to learn what services exist, and avoid duplication."

Perhaps the greatest challenge in deploying SOA is helping business analysts or line-of-business managers understand what services are already available that can be reused. A registry provides such visibility of an enterprise's SOA assets and other artifacts associated with the services.

4) Monitor Performance: "Once services go live, organizations need to keep tabs on them." Adopt services-management software that can monitor the behavior of services after they are designed, tested and deployed. Services-management tools take into account, for example, the reuse factor and the dependencies among services reuse creates. A change to one service will affect every application that makes use of it."

Once the SOA message begins to percolate across the enterprise, more applications may be connecting -- and disconnecting -- from these services with little or no notice. This can create performance challenges if not monitored.

5) Coordinate IT and the Business: SOA adopters "should make sure their IT departments and lines of business are talking. The services approach calls for close collaboration between technologists and the business side of the house. In order to really have a service-oriented architecture, you need to understand what the business wants to achieve."

Opening up IT-business communication is easier said than done. As much as possible, this needs to be baked into corporate governance. See point #2 -- an oversight team can help foster much of the communication needed to make sure the services being built and deployed.

Posted by joemckendrick in SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us