Forrester's Five-Step Path to Building SOA

Forrester analyst Randy Heffner, who has made frequent appearances here for ebizQ events, has just released a report that describes the best way to "build a SOA." (Full report available here at ebizQ.)

Or actually, as Heffner points out, the multiple ways to build a SOA. "There is no one best sequence for building an SOA platform," he writes. "Even though most SOA platforms start with messaging technologies such as HTTP, SOAP, REST, and message queuing, there is no one dominant way or sequence in which to build an SOA platform. The wide diversity among various organizations’ existing software infrastructures, combined with each firm’s different priorities and drivers for SOA, lead to a wide diversity of investment streams for building SOA platforms."

Plus, Heffner adds, incrementally is the best way to go. Businesses keep changing, as do SOA products, so "the majority of firms evolve toward their SOA platform."

According to Heffner, Forrester recommends the following five steps for building an SOA platform:

1) Identify existing infrastructure’s SOA capabilities. In other words, know what you already have, Heffner says. This helps avoid duplication, especially when it comes to spending money on new products. "Identify which functions your existing products provide fully or partially."
2) Identify priorities for new SOA capabilities. Pull out or develop application roadmaps and estimate how SOA-based services will map against these plans, Heffner says. "identify the major types of service implementation styles that will be required for the high-priority services you must build over the near term. For example, service orchestration or legacy integration might be a high priority for your SOA platform, in which case, the first step is determining whether your existing infrastructure can fulfill these requirements. If there are gaps, you can then investigate SOA specialty product categories, such as ESBs or integration-centric business process management suites, to learn how they might close the gaps."

3) Identify your long-term needs for SOA capabilities. This determines what kinds of products a company buys down the road, Heffner says. "Identify your high-level long-term needs for your SOA platform. For example, you may be able to get by for now with lightweight SOA management capabilities (e.g., simple monitoring of service implementations) based on your existing IT management tools, but you will likely see a future need for the stronger SOA features and functions that an SOA management solution provides (e.g., managing service contracts for SOA-based services)."

4) Match your platform plans to your organization’s investment strategy. "Most organizations buy products in connection with specific projects," says Heffner. "However, we see an increasing number of firms that intentionally position such purchases as merely the first stage of a growing investment in the selected products, with each subsequent solution project expanding the investment to meet its needs."

5. Evolve your SOA platform in line with the business value of solution delivery projects. "Find the investment that, within the current project’s bounds of affordability, meets near-term SOA requirements fully," Heffner advised. This is "the approach that best keeps an SOA evolution on track and that has the most palatable investment model."

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