Service Oriented Architecture(SOA)

Success Tip #1: Clearly Define Your Goals

Goals are critical for a project that not only impacts the heart of your business processes but also may cross several major departments and may lead to some organizational change as well.

Prior to embarking on the design phase of the project, make certain that you have done the following:

* Define clearly your goals and objectives.
* Define specifically what you mean by "success."
* Identify the key business processes that will be addressed in the project.
* Identify the key internal and external services to be addressed in the project.
* Identify the key reusable steps.


Success Tip #2: Understand the Nature of SOA Services and "Loose Coupling"

The implementation of SOA is driven by business rather than IT considerations alone. It is a means to achieve business agility and to facilitate organizational evolution and growth.


SOA leads you to the definition and consumption of repeatable internal and external business "services." As an example, when you feel an urge to order a pizza, you do not think about flour and cheese and tomato sauce. Instead, you ask yourself which pizzeria will deliver one to you quickly (the supplier), and what kind of a pizza you want (the service).

"Loose coupling" is a strong element of a successful integration project implementation. Make sure that your process can be streamed easily into your operation and that it will not be too tightly dependent on resource availability. For example, if you loosely coupled your processes from your resources, orders from your Web channel should be able to continue to flow into your organization, even when/if your back office application or your major database is not available.


Success Tip #3: Establish a Clear Project Vision and Milestones

Make certain that test plans are available as part of the design phase, and take into consideration that testing often involves working with other vendors and resources, so be sure to verify their availability when building the schedule.

It is also important to well define the scope of your project and identify those key cross-organizational processes that will make a big difference and, therefore, provide a fast return on your investment, rather than tackling dozens or hundreds of small processes that will affect only minor aspects of your organization. Develop a clear vision of your SOA goals, and avoid being enticed to implement peer-to-peer needs alone.


Success Tip #4: Solicit the Sponsorship of Senior Management

Because the goal of SOA is evolution of the business and its processes, with potential widespread impact across the organization -- even to the point of potential reorganization of personnel resources -- it is vital that members of senior management be active proponents for and sponsors of the project.


Success Tip #5: Build a Strong Project Team

Project management and implementation tools are not enough to ensure success without strong project leadership and a strong team. Your SOA leader should be someone who understands the technical architecture, has the leadership skills to direct the team, can communicate well with the senior management sponsor and the business users, and has the time to focus on the project, as well as the ability to invest in the inevitable learning curve.

The SOA leader will also be required to focus on setting and implementing the SOA strategy, helping to expose internal and external services, deal with resource availability and setting realistic and measurable goals.


Be sure to include a business leader on the team, as well, and make sure that the team can speak a common language to help avoid conflicts and misunderstandings.

Success Tip #6: Identify and Address the Potential Failure Points of Your Processes

Take the following steps to identify your potential failure points:

1. After designing your processes, initiate an additional design phase to identify all potential failure points and determine how you will deal with them.
2. Create loosely coupled processes (see Tip #2). Don't be tempted to run long, synchronous processes without a good reason. The price of doing so may be shutdown from the whole operation in the event of non-availability of one resource.
3. Implement periodic checks and analysis of your failure points.


Success Tip #7: Constantly Measure Your Progress and Make Adjustments as Necessary

Implementing an SOA is a process that evolves -- just as your business does.

Leverage tools that provide you with real-time visibility of your ongoing progress and any bottlenecks at any point in time. Evaluate this information periodically, and make the necessary changes to improve your project performance.