Overview :
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) enables organizations to realize business and technology advantages by combining business process innovation, effective governance, and a service-centric technology approach.
SOA is a long term strategy that requires perpetual focus on transforming the IT (Information Technology) delivery mechanism, but it must also answer immediate business initiatives. The promises of SOA can only be realized by maintaining a balance between long-term enterprise goals and immediate, short-term, business requirements.

SOA: A Mindshift
In order to conquer the complex issues that IT faces in delivering solutions that provide success to the organization, a mind shift is required. SOA offers a mechanism to facilitate that change for both developers and architects. There are a few questions that organizations must consider:

  1. What preparation is required for such a fundamental change?
  2. What is required for such a migration?
  3. How can an organization ensure that the migration is performed in the most cost-effective and impacts the organization the least?
SOA is more about a manner of thinking than about a technology. It is a reformation of the infrastructure supporting IT delivery and is a representation of the cultural and behavioral changes in how organizations employ technology and the internal organizations interrelate.

SOA Definition:
The OASIS Reference Model for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA RM) defines SOA as “a paradigm for organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership domains. It provides a uniform means to offer, discover, interact with and use capabilities to produce desired effects consistent with measurable preconditions and expectations.”
By organizing around distributed capabilities rather than applications, SOA provides key benefits:
  • Improved business and IT productivity, agility and speed
  • Improved Time-To-Market schedules with increased alignment to the objectives of the organization
  • Improved respond to change and delivery of optimal experience
Realizing SOA :
Many organizations have a difficulty on deciding where to begin the SOA journey. A prescription is needed to assist organizations in beginning an SOA journey.

1. Strategically focused, tactically implemented: Begin the journey by identifying a core process that spans multiple business organizations and realize that process with simple, agnostic services.
2. Top-down, bottom-up, middle-out analysis: Identify the services required to support the process, identify functionality in existing systems that can be exposed as services. The analysis must be goal driven and the goals most align with the strategic goals or the organization.
3. Consider core services: Identify any common, core, services and supporting functionality.
4. Travel slowly: Once an organization has successfully deployed initial projects, future technically challenging efforts can travel in parallel.
5. Construct an Enterprise Catalog: Once more and more projects are developed utilizing this new paradigm called SOA, begin to harvest and reuse services. This will begin to reduce cost over time.
6. Spotlight benefits: Undertake projects and efforts in an iterative fashion based upon, partially, the expected return on investment and/or assets (ROI).

Tomorrow : Effective Planning
NB : Image sourced from bea dev2dev site

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