A SOA survey of 244 companies conducted by ebizQ reveals the reality of SOA migrations in that companies are taking an opportunistic approach to SOA working on "islands" of integration.
I have often argued that an incremental transformation to SOA driven by business value is best. The SOA migration effort should be broken down into business domains and prioritized based on value, cost and risk. There should be SOA strategy for integrating business domains - such as federated ESBs. This survey offers evidence that many companies are pursuing excatly this strategy migrating to SOA within individual business units on a project by project basis.
But how do you ensure that SOA then does not create a new set of silos across business units? At Perficient we build what I call the
Strategic Services Blueprint. We create a SOA roadmap (projects over time) and a Strategic Services Blueprint (the future business services catalog) that will serve as a guide for IT.
We also address the SOA silo concern by forming a cross-functional SOA Steering Committee composed of the SOA sponsor, a lead architect from each functional-application system and an enterprise architect.
The SOA blueprint and steering committee will ensure that while tactical projects are building out services, these services stay aligned with strategic SOA goals.
Keeping SOA, the silo killer, from creating new silos
But the survey also shows that there's no such thing as a single, all-encompassing SOA effort that covers every service initiative from every corner of the enterprise. Rather, most SOA or enterprise service efforts are "islands" of integration that arise within individual business units, designed to address specific problems.
There are two interconnected levels to addressing the problem. First, on a technology level, is federation. One out of four companies have already moved to a federated infrastructure to support multiple instances of ESBs or intermediaries.
As Chief Technologist and National Practice Director for SOA with Perficient, Inc., I get the opportunity to work with a lot of customers implementing SOA. See my
bio page for my contact information or just post a comment if you want to talk about your SOA projects.
