Microsoft clarified its service-oriented architecture stance at its recent SOA and Business Processes Conference in Redmond. The vendor -- which has led the way with most of the prominent Web services standards that have morphed into the primary SOA enablers -- says its approach is to tackle SOA at the operational and tactical level, versus a massive enterprise-wide rollout.
John deVadoss, director of Architecture Strategy at Microsoft, calls this focus "Real-World" SOA, a not-so-subtle slap at the top-down enterprise endeavors suggested by other vendors. In a Q&A posted at the Microsoft site, deVadoss urges SOA planners to build incrementally, one project at a time, to build up a successful portfolio of services. It's important not to set out to build SOA just for the sake of doing SOA, he said.
"The fundamental problem with the big-bang mega approaches to SOA is that they almost always end up being out-of-sync with the needs of the business," he said. "This approach has been a key factor in fueling industry discussions around the lack of alignment between business and IT on the topic of SOA."
DeVadoss said Microsoft is a proponent of the "Expose/Compose/Consume" model to SOA: First, there's exposing assets -- "you need to service-enable your existing assets. SOA is not about rip and replace, it is about leveraging your existing assets," he said. Then, SOA is about "composing these services – people call this orchestration or choreography, and sometimes workflow – but the key idea is that you have the infrastructure to empower your people, employees, customers and consumers, to use the services in the real-world."
Finally, he said, "the rubber meets the road when you enable consumption of the services, and so you have what we think of the consume layer."
DeVadoss also provides this advice on getting started with SOA:
1) Set out to deliver value to the business. The goal is not to "do SOA."
2) Take a "middle-out" approach. DeVadoss said that "top-down, big-bang mega approaches do not work in the real-world. Bottom-up approaches are not manageable. But there is an approach that we see successful customers adopt – what we call the 'middle-out' approach. They start with clear business challenges and focus on creating business value."
3) The "build-it-and-they-will-come" approach won't work. DeVadoss said he's seen SOA teams spend 18 months to 30 months building a services infrastructure, only to find the business has moved on. "We recommend customers partition their use cases into small sets and build out the entire use case end-to-end, from the data through to the consumption. Partitioning your functionality helps you track changing business needs much more effectively."
4) Demonstrate value in rapid iterations. "Time-to-value is a critical metric, a healthy metric," DeVadoss pointed out.
5) Use a "snowball" approach. "How do you build a big snowball? You start with a small snowball," said DeVadoss This is probably the most important take away with respect to leveraging SOA to drive business value."
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