The Three -- or Four -- Biggest SOA Mistakes, and How to Avoid Them

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June 30, 2007

The Three -- or Four -- Biggest SOA Mistakes, and How to Avoid Them

Sandra Gittlen, writing in Datamation, explored "three ways to avoid SOA snafus.* Here are the three biggest snafus and how to address them:

1. Operating in a vacuum. SOA is an enterprise project, and should be managed as such. "You have to really get everyone on board -- from the programmers to the shareholders to the end users -- to be successful with SOA."

2. Not creating a governance framework. Governance is a large part of developing an SOA strategy, and organizations must decide ahead of time what their reuse and publication policies will be for the services within their architecture."

3. Treating security as an afterthought. "Security can be one of the trickiest areas of SOA because organizations are reusing services that might have been created externally. "Most services, to be made as reusable as possible, have security stripped out of them. This isn’t good.” IT groups should add service interfaces that address compliance mandates and cater to the highest level of security each application requires. "n addition, IT groups should carefully plot out their authorization and authentication strategies."

I would like to add a fourth bit of advice, which Sandra mentioned in the article but did not elevate to a "Big Mistake:"

4. Pushing SOA through as a massive enterprise initiative. That's sort of like, as they say, trying to "boil the ocean." SOA should be introduced incrementally, starting out with quick wins to demonstrate its value to the rest of the organization. If SOA is launched as this galactic transformative mega-project, constituents will be quickly disappointed when they don't see mega-results to their areas of the business.

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Comments

Business Process Discovery leads to
Business Process Analysis leads to
Business Process Improvement leads to
Business Process Management leads to
Service Orientated Architecture

It all starts with discovery and ends with SOA – BPM, BPI and BPA are just middle steps and ultimately the most valuable asset to the business is the repository of its business processes which in turn act as a best practice library and services hub.

The repository is called Process Master
The services are called ESB

Posted by: Alan Crean at July 3, 2007 04:24 AM