Planning_and_Impleme.. - didier beck weblog

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Planning and Implementing SOA
The SOA Transformation stage will involve establishing the business metrics (or Key Performance Indicators
– KPIs) that work for the organisation. Whilst there may be some generic KPIs, it is important that the
organisation understands what metrics are important to them, and subsequently identifies how to measure
and use the information that is then generated. By this phase, alignment should be significantly improved
and business and technology working together in partnership. The
organisation will be implementing both internal and external processes and
services, and working towards optimisation of those services.
By the time the organisation has evolved to SOA maturity, it will be receiving
feedback from all aspects of the enterprise and can look to using this feedback
on an ongoing basis in order to continually optimise business processes.
Process optimisation is an ongoing concept, not an end point in itself.
Architecture
Butler Group has discussed the importance of enterprise architecture many
times, and believes that when moving to SOA, the ‘A’ – architecture, as in the
fundamental organisation of a system embodied by its components, their
relationship to each other and to the environment and the principles guiding its design and evolution (IEEE
P1471/D5.3) – becomes critical. This has to include the business (people) side as well as the technology
aspects, and may extend outside the enterprise, particularly in collaborative environments.
During the discovery phase, an organisation may need to develop an architecture competency if one does
not exist – gaining an understanding of architecture concepts and benefits can clarify both business and IT
objectives.
The development and deployment phase should see this competency then being put to work to define the
business and technical architecture for the organisation – and will need to work closely with the business
to understand how the business needs will drive the underlying technology structures.
The SOA transformation phase will see the full fleshing-out of more formal data and application
architectures, as architectural awareness grows and the organisation itself evolves.
When an organisation moves into the SOA maturity phase, it will be developing a common service architecture,
where reuse of existing services is a given, and new services evolve easily as needs become apparent.
Data Management
Data is an undervalued area in these days of distributed computing, but developing a corporate data model
will be vital in making sense of how data can best be reused in SOA. When Enterprise Resource Planning
(ERP) systems were developed, little attention was paid to how information would be used – they were
designed to be optimised for transactions but not for information and
In the investigation
and discovery phase,
the organisation
should develop an
information
architecture
competency, and start
defining a service to
information mapping.
The SOA
Transformation stage
will involve
establishing the
business metrics (or
Key Performance
Indicators – KPIs) that
work for the
organisation.
reporting. There is a risk with SOA that the data services needed to deliver
adequate information and intelligence will be an afterthought as well.
In the investigation and discovery phase, the organisation should develop an
information architecture competency, and start defining a service to
information mapping. This should help clarify what data is stored, where it is
duplicated and potentially redundant, and where there may be gaps in
corporate data that are filled by personal sources. At this stage, it will be
valuable to develop a corporate data dictionary – complete with semantic
definitions so that there is a common understanding across the organisation.
During the development and deployment phase, master data management will
become a necessity. Organisations today have multiple versions of common
data items, and whilst this may be necessary in a distributed (both technically and geographically) world,
it will also be a major challenge. Understanding where data originates, who the owner should be, and
developing a policy for ensuring that master data is rapidly propagated to where it needs to be used, must
be addressed during this phase. At this stage, the organisation will need to develop an understanding of
where and what content is used in its various processes.
December 2006 Section 1: SOA Deployment 9