Although I believe that SOA is in the wrong category of "Enterprise Architecture Technology" I will ask my question in this part of the forum.

Do Enterprise Architects out there have experience with creating enterprise architectures which are embracing the service oriented paradigm?

From which industry are you?
How did you go about translating the business services to reusable software services adhering to SOA principles? SOA Governance, yes, but how did you achieve the cultural change within the organization? Do business people see this as an opportunity? Or do they care?
Or is it just about using "SOA enabling technologies" to integrate other middleware?

What are peoples thoughts on topics like this? Is this happening in the industry? Are people really embracing the opportunity SOA presents? Is business transformation really happening? According to SAP and others it is, but do you see it out there in your business?

Kind regards,

Richard

hi Richard,

Let me try to answer some of your question(s).

I have worked with multiple fortune 500 clients to enable their SOA initiative, MDM, ERP as well as EA initiatives. I would say my recent 4 clients experience over the last year, all have adopted the SOA paradigm to align their information management strategies. All of them had SOA initiatives, at least two of them wrapped SOA/MDM framework as their main EA goal. Two had much more broader initiative SOA/MDM/ERP and content management. All had their new or recent EA group formed with new leadership to set their EA governance, strategy and roadmap.

Being said that, I have not seen many companies that have fully matured SOA framework with 50% or more reusable components, but were in the process of defining core components that are common and to all LOB.

SOA Governance - I would say (my personal opinion) that not many vendors out there have an integrated capability. The governance piece should be broader and should not tied into just SOA or any technology framework. I know Computer Associates and HP are leaders in project and portfolio management capabilities and SOA Software, Software AG, Amberpoint,IBM, HP are for integrated SOA governance. I would like to see a product that covers the entire EA Governance portfolio including infrastructure, data, application and software life cycle.

Cultural changes - This is the hardest challenge still out there with any initiative. No matter SOA or MDM or ERP changing your organizational culture is critical for success of these programs. Fro m my experience, I would say the more higher level executive sponsor you have for the program the better influence and support you will receive from the business for change of culture.

Opportunity - This is a term used primarily by EA/IT group. I would say business care less about technology opportunities than the CIO office. But I have seen two ways clients starting their SOA journey (1) integrating their application (2) enabling their data integration

SOA - I believe more and more companies are embracing SOA. Whether it is defining business transformation, some of them, but not all. According to SAP, IBM, Oracle, SUN and others yes this may be true but not all their 1000's of customers have transformed their business with SOA. Some of them have terribly failed their SOA initiative and have spend millions of dollars and still ongoing. Do they put this case studies out? I do not think so.

Hope I have answered most of the questions. Please feel to add thoughts.

Thanks
Sam

Hi Sam,

Thanks for the insight. I think that SOA is an opportunity for vendors to build re-usable software services into products which then can be composed/customized/etc. for customers and hence fit better into their Service Oriented Enterprise and it will give vendors the opportunity to diversify, i.e. make different products, for different markets and use techniques from Software Product Lines (http://www.lero.ie/splc2008/home.html). In effect the way SAP seems to do it with their Enterprise Service Bundles. I have been talking to people from the IT side in the Insurance business but they are stating that the products they buy are not SOA, so already they are the legacy assets of the future? Other then SAP is anybody building software products based on the architectural principles of a SOA?

I do not see SOA as a technology. It is architecture. The CIO could see it as an opportunity to get more control over the IT in the enterprise which is suppose to help the CIO to deliver on the overall business goals of the enterprise. The CIO will be able to reason better about the enterprise architecture and hence is able to better focus on what is core to the business and what is context (Moore, Living on the Fault Line). Do you see this happening? SOA, or better Enterprise SOA should be a business initiative rather then an IT one.

You made a statement there about 2 clients starting the SOA journey using it as integration? In that case SOA is nothing more then technology are are they really transforming their business into services and use SOA to align it with the IT, a first step being a wrap and reuse of legacy assets? Is it a bottom up approach or top down?

Richard