You have piloted your SOA and it is a success. What happens now? How do you scale SOA to meet the needs of the larger enterprise?
This is one of the biggest challenges SOA proponents now face -- moving to enterprise SOA, says Brenda Michelson, Program Director for the SOA Consortium and principal of Elemental Links. The challenge many organizations now face is "getting beyond the initial SOA challenges to things like operations, security, properly defining services," she says. "People are really starting to focus now on the bigger problems of how do you have a Service Oriented Architecture at scale. So how do you move beyond pilot?"
Brenda, who is part of our ebizQ community here, is a thought leader in the SOA space. In a new podcast, she spoke with ebizQ's Peter Schooff about the state of SOA today. Many people have been talking about the technology issues, but these may pale in comparison to larger organizational issues:
"SOA is an approach to deliver business capability so it's broader than just buying an ESB, or registry, or placing a mediator. ...CIOs told us that SOA is pervasive and the technology is the easy part.... ...architecture and technology were important and it's what people talked about that most of our conversations really revolved around organization and process issues."
Brenda observes that SOAs are typically launched by architects that aren't necessarily focused on organizational issues such as funding SOA, or working with database teams. What is required is a form of tailored roadmap to help SOA planners see what's down the road.
The SOA Consortium has been working on a framework to help companies build and plan their roadmaps: "The basic framework itself and the supporting context diagram are available in document form, and then our next step is to launch a public wiki [in September] of all the contents so that you could actually drill into the different activities and see the relevance to SOA, see some insights from our practitioners, some learning that we've gathered along the way," Brenda explained.
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