"Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, 'Where have I gone wrong?' Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.'" -Charlie Brown.
Perhaps Charlie Brown should invest five cents for Lucy's expert counseling. But even Lucy may not be able to relieve the angst that comes from SOA implementations that fall short of their goals.
Ash Parikh and Murty Gurajada, writing in JavaWorld, say just as Charlie Brown has his worries, what keeps many IT managers up at night are the disappointing results they have seen from their SOA investments, which have been spurred by vendor overpromising.
What's gone wrong? Along with confusion in the market, and corporate cultural barriers to cross-enterprise sharing of services and data, the authors note that many implementations have either been non-SOA or halfhearted SOA approaches that "lead to custom integrations, which cost a lot of money and make the systems more tightly coupled, thus exacerbating the problem."
Fear not, say Parikh and Gurajada, who provide a roadmap for the successful ingredients for SOA. The path to SOA excellence includes effective governance tools and practices, along with business process management and workflow solutions.
At the core of any well-designed SOA should be a metadata repository and data orchestration engine, they observe. "It should not only contain all the data and metadata relevant to an organization's functioning, but also provide a comprehensive set of features to manage these artifacts effectively."
In addition, they add, all highly functioning SOAs have another thing in common -- they also include business process management and workflow elements. "The application layer may discover and consume services directly from the service registry/repository layer, or it may go through the workflow/business process management platform for more flexibility," they write.
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