Section 12.2. The Organizational SOA Roadmap


12.2. The Organizational SOA Roadmap

Having introduced the architectural roadmap in the first part of this book (for example, see the different SOA expansion stages we discussed in Chapter 6), we will now take a closer look at the organizational aspects of the SOA roadmap. Figure 12-3 provides a general overview of this organizational roadmap.

Figure 12-3. The organizational SOA roadmap.


The first step on the organizational roadmap is problem recognition. In Chapter 1, we provided a discussion of the reasons that lead to a phase of agony in the development of enterprise software, manifested by a decrease in development productivity and general inefficiency. If your organization is in this position, it is important to recognize this fact. You will have to determine the reasons that the IT organization is in this situation and discuss them with stakeholders before you can define a strategy for getting out of it.

Next, a number of key people have to get together and agree on the vision for the enterprise IT renovation roadmap and which role an SOA will play in it. Often, it can make sense to formulate a vision statement, which describes the ultimate goal, and how it should be achieved. People from both the business and technology side should be involved in formulating the vision. Although a visionary technology architect often drives such an undertaking, it is equally important that business people who can validate the concepts of the vision from the business point of view are included because they play a key role in the development processes and boards that are required to set up an SOA (see Sections 12.3 and 12.4).

Having agreed on the vision, the next step is to define a plan that outlines how the goals defined in the vision can be achieved. This will most likely not be a detailed project plan including concrete details about implementation resources, and concrete delivery dates, but more of a high-level roadmap document that highlights the key milestones to be achieved. As we will outline in the next section, the four pillars of a successful enterprise SOA strategy include budget, backers, a team, and a project to start with. These should be included in the plan.

The development of this plan will most likely go hand in hand with the decision making process, which will eventually lead to the go/no-go decision. Assuming a decision for the execution of the plan is made, the typical next step is to start with a suitable pilot project, as identified in the plan. The next section will provide more insights into the ideal characteristics of this pilot.

Finally, it is important to realize that in order to successfully establish an SOA on the enterprise level, you must constantly keep track of the project's status in order to fine-tune and steer the overall strategy. The introduction of an SOA is not a once-off project but instead requires constant efforts to ensure that future development projects will adhere to the architectural principles of the SOA. As we discussed in Chapter 1, enterprise architects constantly must fight the battle between tactical, short-term development and strategic refactoring and architectural compliance (see Section 1.3 for more details). Thus, the enterprise-wide rollout of the SOA should really be seen as an activity that runs in parallel to the day-to-day project business of the IT organization, including as much motivation work as technical guidance.



    Enterprise SOA. Service-Oriented Architecture Best Practices
    Enterprise SOA: Service-Oriented Architecture Best Practices
    ISBN: 0131465759
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2003
    Pages: 142

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