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by Eric Marks, Contributing Editor   With SOA and Web services high on most organizations' priority lists, perhaps it's time you took a look at your internal SOA readiness. Do you have an SOA strategy and vision? What is your concept of services? Is appropriate SOA governance in place? When I evaluate the SOA maturity of organizations, I like to examine the following criteria: SOA strategy and vision; services concept and maturity; SOA architecture and technology stack; SOA governance and policy enforcement; organization and culture; and SOA metrics and results to date. These dimensions frame how well an organization has prepared itself for SOA success. How ready are you for SOA? A simple self evaluation on these maturity dimensions will give you a better feel for your readiness. Most importantly, it will help ensure you've considered these important aspects of SOA. SOA Strategy & Vision: What business goals are you seeking -- improved agility, lower integration costs, reduced development budget? Whatever your goals are, you must explicitly describe them as clear outcomes of your SOA efforts. Services Concept: I like to get a feel for what various organizations mean by "services." This gets to the fundamental premise of service-oriented architecture. Your services concept is the vehicle through which you will attain the business goals articulated in your SOA strategy. The industry has embraced Web services based on XML payloads, WSDL service descriptions, and SOAP messages in general. However, many benefits are to be gained from technical services such as security, audit, logging, and others. If you seek agility and faster development processes, this may suggest you need the inherent composability of Web services. Whatever your goals are, your services concept must align with your SOA strategy and vision. SOA Enabling Technology/Architecture:How capable is your current IT architecture of accommodating your services concept? In other words, if you plan to expose or develop Web services based on industry standards, you may need to add new SOA-enabling tools and technology to your architecture, such as UDDI registries, Web services management, enterprise service buses, and additional security solutions. Your SOA-enabling technology must support your services, and I always advocate understanding your services first before selecting your technology and tools. SOA Governance and Policies: SOA governance is a big deal. Simply put, governance establishes the policies and rules, operating model, processes and procedures, standards, and developer guidelines for your SOA. Such governance spans four tiers, which include strategic governance, operating model governance, lifecycle governance, and, of course, the enabling technology and tools. Think about SOA governance from a strategic perspective, then identify the processes and organizations, then work it through the services lifecycle from design, to publishing, discovery, and runtime. Once these processes are in place, then consider the tooling that can help enforce policies. SOA governance is all about enforcing policies for your SOA processes. The other two SOA maturity dimensions will follow at another time. Focus on these four first. If you can clearly articulate an SOA strategy, services concept, and define your architecture and SOA governance and polices, you'll be ahead of the game, and you'll be more ready to engage in the SOA journey. |