*Editor's note: For Part I of this article, click here.

Most of us would agree that service-oriented architecture (SOA) doesn't happen overnight-you need long-term investments. But we also know that businesses need immediate returns on IT spend. With this dilemma, how does an IT manager build out SOA while returning value on incremental SOA investments? The answer lies in judicious project selection and will be the focus of this second article in the Path to Level 5 SOA series. The first article discussed how to assess your SOA readiness to get an understanding of the gaps between current capabilities, that is, your current maturity, and future goals. In project selection, you fill out the gaps and build out your SOA by identifying IT projects that provide business value.

Build Out Your SOA, a Project at a Time

Now that you understand what capabilities you need to enhance, how best to proceed? Executing on projects is the most pragmatic approach to fill capability gaps in your architecture and infrastructure. The SOA approach does not require you to spend months defining an architecture or making people changes in isolation. If you are starting out new, we believe, SOA is best absorbed in an organization by selecting a pilot project that has immediate business benefit. And if you demonstrate success early, you will have a string of SOA projects in the pipeline. With each project, you bring in additional product components, enrich your service portfolio, and enhance your architecture. With a rich service portfolio, identification of services required to compose an organization's business process is faster and reuse is maximized-eventually moving you up the maturity model. We also believe that SOA adoption is suited for an incremental approach, unlike the big bang approach for monolithic systems, with additional SOA components increasing the value of existing components exponentially. In this context, project selection becomes a critical activity.

In-Depth Study Reveals Value Patterns and Accelerators

If project selection is critical, which projects are best suited for SOA? We turned to customers to find the "SOA sweet spots," or the projects that are helping both IT and business succeed. After working with more than 100 early SOA adopters over the past 24 months, conducting more than 120 hours of in-depth interviews on the topic of SOA business value, and spending a year publishing the book BPEL Cookbook: Best Practices for SOA-based Integration and Composite Applications Development jointly with 10 customers and partners, we found projects that generated high success rates can be categorized into three SOA value patterns: