One of the classic pieces of advice that gets applied to many technology or business endeavors is not to try to "boil the ocean." The same applies to building out service-oriented architecture. Many success stories so far have started developing and deploying their SOAs incrementally, project by project, ROI by ROI.
Select a service area that can deliver quick ROI, and put it in place as a proof point that can demonstrate the viability of the SOA approach to the rest of the enterprise. This, of course, is a bottom-up approach. Some SOA proponents say because SOA transforms the enterprise, a top-down organization-wide approach is what's needed. Often, SOA starts as a bottom-up, incremental initiative, then evolves to a corporate-wide top-down approach as the ROI is realized.
A new report in ComputerWorld looked at one company, the IT operations group at Siemens AG, which first built services around automating and streamlining the processes for fulfilling internal requests to IT for new equipment and passwords.
Thomas Buse, section manager of concepts and processes for Siemens, said that "once users from various departments started using that system for new workers, they asked IT to similarly automate and improve the processes in their departments." He added that in the process, Siemens cut the time required to implement new processes by 83%. The company releases four to eight new business processes to run on its SOA every six to 12 weeks.
A related article also describes an incremental approach to SOA taken at Clear Channel Communications. The media company began its SOA efforts two years ago with the creation of a portal with single sign-on access to its PeopleSoft applications. Justin Myrick, solutions architect at the San Antonio-based company, said that his team "picked a fairly small project to get going on, something we thought we could complete pretty quickly. We had great success in getting our environment set up. In three months, we got this project out live. Then we chose another project to get started and then had two in parallel after that."
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