Business Transformation in Action

I recently had the honor of emceeing the launch of a new book called An Implementor's Guide to SOA: Getting It Right. (The Webcast can be accessed here at the Composite Software site.)

The book is a quick read, and drills right down to the essentials of getting moving with SOA. As author and editor Jim Green, CEO of Composite Software, explained, he purposely kept the length of the book to about 100 pages. "We wanted to write something that could be absorbed over the course of a coast-to-coast airplane ride," he said.

Jim was joined in writing the book by six other well-known SOA experts-- including Paul Butterworth, Luc Clement, Hemant Ramachandra, Jeff Schneider, Hub Vandervoort, and David Besemer.

The theme of the book? I can boil it down to three words -- as Nike put it: "Just Do It." It doesn't matter what kind of SOA budget you have, or even if you have a budget at all -- there are still practical steps you can take today to get started.

And don't worry about not getting every detail -- things will evolve. In fact, service-orienting large-scale systems cannot be fully thought through in the early stages, Jim Green said. One of SOA's greatest failures is that it often is subjected to paralysis by analysis. "The longer that you ponder the imponderables as you plan, the lower the probability of your success."

Or, as he put it in the first chapter of the book: "No one thinks it all through at once. No one puts all the pieces in place perfectly. But once on the right path, it is more straightforward than it first seems, and additional pieces fall into place logically."

In fact, one of the most powerful messages coming out of the book is that SOA is not a luxury reserved for the corporations with the deepest pockets. SOA is something everyone can take advantage of and benefit from. You don't need to get caught up in trying to boil the ocean. Transformation starts with small steps, and SOA success will happen in increments.

Some advice from the book:

• "SOA is the only good alternative for building large-scale systems"
• "Design service interfaces that are simple, consistent, well-documented, and motivated by business requirements to ensure adoption, reusability, and expandability"
• "Understand the difference between a service registry and a service repository"
• "Develop a solid understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the basic Web services request/reply protocols versus the enhanced capabilities of an ESB."
• "Draw up well-defined guidelines for identifying, modeling, implementing, discovering, consuming, and deploying services."
• "Complement training with change management to ensure new skills are utilized."
• "Start anywhere, but start nonetheless."