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April 21, 2006The Path to SOA Enlightenment
SOA appears to have become the holy grail of IT. While it has been a known best practice for over 25 years, only recently have the obstacles to SOA been removed through the universal acceptance of the Web services standards. Now that the risk of SOA adoption has been removed, it is a must have for organizations seeking to increase agility and competitiveness.
Achieving the benefits of SOA depends much more on how a company commits resources and organizes for success, than on a particular technology. The most important success factor for technology decisions is how they fit into the overall architecture. This requires an understanding of how to create an integrated infrastructure to support to development and rapid deployment of SOA-based solutions.
But the most difficult challenges in SOA have nothing to do with technology. These include organizational factors such as who designs and controls the architecture, is it centralized, decentralized or is there a hybrid approach. Who defines and manages cross organizational processes? Who controls access to data? How do you design web services to maximize reuse and business agility? How do you design and implement an event driven architecture?
The answers to these issues do not come in a shrink wrapped box. They cannot be purchased from a vendor, or outsourced overseas. To gain competitive advantage from SOA, organizations need to develop core competency in SOA architecture, design, development, deployment and management.
For this reason, I have decided to chair the new education committee within the Integration Consortium. The mission of this committee is to define the roles within an organization that need education and the set of skills, standards and tools each role requires. We plan to define certification requirements for a certified SOA and Integration Architect, and one or more types of SOA and Integration Specialists. These certification requirements can be used by organizations as guidelines for their training and hiring programs. The education committee with also take a leadership role in contributing to the Integration Body of Knowledge I-BOK that will contain content in support of the certification standards. This material will be available to members at no charge. Membership to the committee is open to all IC members.
Next Tuesday, April 21, 2006 at 12:00 ET we are presenting a live webinar entitled “The Road to SOA Enlightenment”. This webinar will feature interactive polling. Join in and let us know what you think are the most important factors to SOA success. To register click here: http:///www.ebizq.net/webinars/6857.html Hope to hear from you then on line, or please respond to this blog. What type of training or education do you think is needed to ensure SOA success?
Posted by bethgb at 10:40 AM in
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What about testing? This surely must be on the critical path for SOA success?
Architects and developers are facing new and demanding testing challenges because the assembly nature of SOA and integration initiatives requires validation and testing of not only individual applications and integration components, but also the supported business processes. This can be difficult due to complexities of underlying architectures, as well as project, team and system dependencies.
Sure, MDA, Process modeling, standards, etc are important, but so are tools that help validate the SOA and the various services and integrations. If we shine a light on this area, we see very few solutions but many, many problems.
Posted by: Chris Benedetto at April 27, 2006 12:11 PM
I agree that testing is important. Check out the post on SOA testing.
http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/bethgb/archives/2005/12/
Parasoft has some unique answers there.
Posted by: Beth Gold-Bernstein at April 28, 2006 02:57 PM
Since we're plugging vendors in this market, I think Interactive TKO (iTKO) and its product, LISA, has a unique and forward thinking approach to SOA testing. The whole automated, continuous testing foundation seems to be a very important backbone to quality enterprise application integrations.
Posted by: Jamey H. at September 18, 2006 11:22 AM
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