What Is an SOA Roadmap and Why Do You Need One?

What Is an SOA Roadmap and Why Do You Need One?

SOA Service-Oriented Architecture is an IT strategy that organizes the discrete functions contained in enterprise applications into interoperable, standards-based services that can be combined and reused quickly to meet business needs. The benefits of SOA will be realized only if the balance between the long-term goals and the shorter-term needs of the business are preserved. This balance can be maintained by instituting a set of organizational, financial, operational, design, and delivery practices from the outset of your SOA initiative. But rather than taking a "big bang" approach, it is important to deploy culture-changing disciplines in an incremental and iterative fashion to allow for an organizational learning curve. In essence, an SOA roadmap provides an iterative and incremental way to capture (and recapture) your organization's unique plan as you progress.

Your SOA roadmap should contain three critical characteristics:

Maturity: Treat your SOA roadmap as a "living document" that continually captures experiences and lessons learned. As your SOA roadmap matures, your SOA initiative reaches higher levels of sophistication in a controlled manner. The creation of an SOA roadmap begins with an assessment of your organization's current capabilities and disciplines applicable to SOA. This process can be initiated by using BEA's Online Self-Assessment Tool.

Scope: A complete SOA roadmap should encompass six domains (see Figure 1). These domains, while distinct, are interrelated and interdependent. Executing on each domain is fundamental to the success of an enterprise-wide SOA initiative. The SOA roadmap should clearly delineate the boundaries of your SOA initiative and establish a transparent and flexible timeline for achieving SOA goals. These goals should be broken down into manageable phases, which can then be realized in an iterative and incremental manner.

Quality: By applying a "Learn & Adapt" process at each milestone, and by being both iterative and incremental, your roadmap will remain relevant throughout the SOA initiative. To ensure your SOA roadmap's quality, communicate and validate it with all stakeholders, soliciting feedback and buy-in from all quarters.