SOA not quite DOA. Its only just begun?

SOA: Down to Earth

"strong governance around the processes within an SOA deployment is a critical step"

"get specific about requirements, such as reporting tools, from both the business and technology sides of an enterprise"

"You need to have measurement [capabilities] in place to gauge the success of your project,”


Integration's New Strategy
"Manufacturing broke its work up into pieces 200 years ago. What's taken you so long?'"
"Technology should be expressed as a unit of business work"


My thoughts are SOA is not unlike EAI. Its important to differentiate why its different though. So, in my humble opinion it boils down to
services being as autonomous as possible:

- Simple to use, simple to interface
- Deployed in separate units
- Change over time
- Run in the context of the consuming application and can fail
- Can exist on different platforms

And then the next level (of maturity?) is to go beyond structural compatibility and start talking rules and governance of the services

Admittedly I'm still wearing my "Softie" hat. See here for my indoctrination




10 steps to SOA

1: Think big, start small
2: Go to the whiteboard
3: Survey your surroundings
4: Connect your first services
5: Deploy registry
6: Start tackling governance
7: Lay your security plans
8: Messaging infrastructure
9: Deploy service management
10: Consider (service) orchestration