Have You Made Your Service Oriented Resolutions?
By David S. Linthicum
January 15, 2008 —
(Page 1 of 2)
As the calendar turns to 2008, this is a good time to make some New Year's resolutions around the creation of your SOA, and getting your applications, and enterprise, into a more agile state. Here are some to consider:
1. Create a core SOA strategy for the enterprise. While many strategies end up without sponsors or execution, a quick and dirty, written-down strategy will provide a base of understanding for the enterprise that this is, indeed, the correct direction, and provide an approach for moving forward. From here you can create a plan and request resources. A strategy is a great place to start.
2. Obtain some SOA training. SOA is a funny thing. Everyone thinks they understand it, but during execution many projects fail due to lack of knowledge. Now is a good time to take some SOA training, and I’m not talking about some Webinar. I’m talking about a multi-day class where you work and share information with others. This will reap many benefits such as avoiding core mistakes and doing it right the first time. However, there is good training and bad training out there…make sure to check the references of the training provider. You want to take a course from a practitioner, not a professional teacher; there is a difference.
3. Review core lifecycle procedures and update for SOA. Most enterprises have software development lifecycle procedures set in stone and follow them religiously. However, SOA is a bit different than “traditional” design, development, testing and deployment, so now is a good time to update those procedures to support SOA. This means dealing with applications as collections of services, not a monolithic application, and that’s a very different way of going about software development. Also, revisit resolution No. 2. Retraining would be good here as well.
4. Create a SOA ROI. Once you go into your boss’ office to ask for the million or so bucks you need to complete your SOA, he or she is going to ask the burning question: What’s in this for the business? You’ll need a response to that, and it’s ROI. Figuring out the ROI for your enterprise is more art than science, however; in essence, it’s to understand the existing inefficiencies, put a cost to those inefficiencies, and then determine how much savings will come from the use of a SOA. For the most part, SOAs are all about adding value by making the architecture more changeable or agile. Thus, the more changeable your organization, the more ROI SOA will bring. However, your mileage may vary a lot, so make sure you create an ROI model that reflects your current business. I’ve done dozens of these, and they are all different.
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