Have You Made Your Service Oriented Resolutions?

By David S. Linthicum

January 15, 2008 —

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.

5. Get help. One of the things I’m finding is that SOA is being driven by IT leaders within the enterprise, and many times the last thing they want is people smarter than them around. It’s called job protection, and it’s silly and counterproductive. SOA is complex, difficult and takes a long time. Moreover, it’s a bet-the-business kind of project and you can’t fool around with a trial and error process as you did with that data warehouse or ERP implementation you did. It’s architecture, it’s systemic, and it’s important. Thus, at the very least, get some mentoring assistance, somebody who can look over your shoulder and make sure you’re not making critical mistakes. I’m not talking about consultants to do your work, but somebody to validate your work and teach you.

6. Create a SOA study strategy. There is a lot out there on SOA: blogs, podcasts, columns, books and a few conferences as well. So, which information do you ignore, and which do you absorb? Now is a good time to look at the resources out there, and create a “My SOA” page that includes blogs, columns, podcasts and other media feeds that you find helpful. This will both help you learn and stay current with the technology trends. However, make sure you don’t become one of those guys who “manage by magazine.” Those are mere data points, and not a strategy specific to you.

So, will 2008 be the year of SOA? No, it will be 2008-2015, if you ask me. SOA is a journey, not a project, and there is so much to get done that most of you are feeling a bit overwhelmed. My best advice is to get started; if 2007 slipped away without progress on your SOA, then this is a great time to make some 2008 SOA resolutions.

David S. Linthicum is a managing partner at ZapThink. Reach him at david@zapthink.com.

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