Business Transformation in Action

Lorraine Lawson at IT Business Edge just surfaced some helpful words on SOA planning from the director of enterprise architecture and strategic planning for U.S. Coast Guard.

If this is what the Coast Guard recommends, you can't go wrong. Not only that, but the author of this advice, Andrew N. Blumenthal, was also the former chief enterprise architect at the U.S. Secret Service.

Blumenthal makes the following recommendations:

Know when to use services. "Define the extent to which we will and will not use services; services are selected with intent and do not randomly spring up," Blumenthal says.

Think big, start small. I couldn't agree more. As Blumenthal puts it: "This allows us to validate the architecture, while giving the organization value, realized as usable services."

Build on what you have Viva la mainframe!

Use SOA to streamline business processes. Many people forget that this is the most immediate and measurable impact of an SOA effort. As Blumenthal puts it: "SOA is an inherently flexible and interoperable model for hosting application functionality; this provides an opportunity to rethink and improve business processes."

Incorporate standards. There's a lot of criticism that there are too many standards. However, there are core standards that will ensure the hot-swappability of components and applications. "Use industry Web service standards for navigation, application logic, integration, data stores, and enterprise infrastructure," according to Blumenthal.

Build around a security model. We need a lot more of this in SOA these days. And, as Blumenthal admonishes: "Functional design needs to be built around security, and not vice versa (security cannot be added as an afterthought)."

Design with quality in mind. "Quality must be designed into the product, and not inspected into it."

Organize development resources. "Group development team around logical business tasks, and not around technologies."

Train developers. Definitely not enough of this going on. "Ensure designers and developers have the skills to implement SOA properly," Blumenthal says.