The mission of this blog is to provide insights for planning, building, and managing SOA. I've talked plenty about building and managing SOA in this space, so it's time to give planning some equal time.
In fact, ebizQ just posted an article by Eric Roch, national practice director of Perficient, which presents a great discussion of the planning that needs to go into SOA.
Roche's first piece of advice is: Don't attempt to apply the tried-and-true formulas that have been used for ERP and other IT projects in the past. "An ERP deployment best practice is unfortunately to force a change to the business process itself to support the package out-of-the-box," he writes. SOA is about adapting technology to the business, not the other way around. (I actually posted a blog with this theme, "Processes Should Shape Software, Not the Other Way Around," in October, which describes the SOA promise not to force-fit processes into software.)
Next, to bring the business into the SOA planning process -- and avoid creating some monster that nobody will use -- Roche advises the creation of an SOA Steering Committee comprised of members from across the organization. The membership should consist of the SOA sponsor, a lead architect from each functional-application system and an enterprise architect. What will this committee do? Their job will be to "establish standards, processes, and the SOA roadmap the organization can manage the dramatic changes necessary for the SOA transformation."
Next, there's the vision thing. The SOA Steering Committee need to devise a strategic services "blueprint" in which proposed services are determined "by decomposing business functions keeping in mind the cross-functional needs (reuse potential) for each candidate," Roche says. "Service decomposition looks at the enterprise as a whole and seeks to define the core services needed to run the company - the future-state services catalog."
The committee needs to determine areas that may benefit from service enablement, such as customer service, business partner integration, supply chain, employee benefits, and product lifecycle management efforts.
The key factor here is that the business needs to be in the driver's seat of the SOA effort -- in too many SOA efforts these days, IT often is going it alone, a move that will only result in rudderless, siloed SOA projects.
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