I/S Resource Group: Transition to Enterprise SOA

Transition to Enterprise SOA: More Than Technology

Successful Web service implementations no longer make news. Many organizations that have undertaken pilot and small-scale Web services projects report technical success. These early tactical Web services projects prove that the core Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) technologies (messaging, SOAP, WSDL, etc.) work.

But the tactical success of these initial Web services projects largely results from their limited scope and skunk-works development approach. They generally involve sharing and reusing a small number of services within a single application or department. Any cross-department service sharing typically occurs between the volunteer business-area participants who sponsored the project and collaborated on the services definition and development.

Committed, but Unaware

The real test comes when organizations attempt a Service-Oriented Architecture solution on an Enterprise basis. Because Enterprise SOA tends to disrupt everything it touches, successful Enterprise SOA implementation requires effective planning and management to minimize and channel the disruption. Many organizations that enjoy tactical SOA success decide to embark on Enterprise SOA without understanding the magnitude of the transition from tactical to strategic SOA. We call these organizations “Committed, but Unaware”.

Methodology and Sociology, as well as Technology

Enterprise SOA deployment, even if internal, requires implementers to successfully transcend purely technical solutions to balance overlapping Technology, Sociology and Methodology challenges.

SOA Technology begins with the core Web services protocols, and then extends to encompass the entire architecture and computing approach that defines and distinguishes SOA, including reusable and shared Web services, XML messaging, WSDL, SOAP, WS* protocols, loose-coupling, security and the orchestration, choreography and execution of workflow on Enterprise Services Bus (ESB) or other middle-tier implementations.

SOA Sociology addresses the human and organization aspects of SOA, including culture, politics, collaboration, organizational behavior, group dynamics, governance, ownership, payment, security, business semantics, etc.

SOA Methodology specifies how the participating organizations and project teams will address the technical and sociological issues, including best practices, processes and procedures for defining and implementing services and workflows, service consumption, policy definition, service metadata documentation and publication, semantic reconciliation, service stewardship, service and architecture maintenance, etc.

Business Driven

Enterprise SOA embodies business-driven flexible shared-service solutions fabricated from open, cross-platform technologies, implemented through structured methodologies and enabled by sociological growth. Organizations deploy Enterprise SOA to achieve defined and tangible business goals through aggressive, flexible and pervasive utilization of reusable and shared services on an enterprise basis, both within the organization and throughout the supply/value chain, by integrating business processes to link business associates and partners.

Because it is business-driven and spans political entities, Enterprise SOA requires the strong commitment and constant support of one or more business-area Executive Champions. Top and mid-level management must understand the fundamental organizational and procedural changes that Enterprise SOA will introduce. Management must predict and assess the implication of these changes, and they must plan and implement the culture, environment and processes required to deploy Enterprise SOAs so that they realize their potential benefits.

Management Challenges

An Enterprise SOA has, by definition, an Enterprise scope. Instead of a few volunteers collaborating informally, management mandates organization-wide and external shared service usage to maximize the benefits of business flexibility, process integration and cost savings. Organizations find themselves dealing with significant management challenges that they must successfully address- both internally, among participating divisions, and externally, among business partners.

Enterprise SOA requires formal executive sponsorship and direction to span operational areas and, often, organizations. Because dozens of business areas share dozens of services and complex business processes, service governance must evolve from locally owned to shared stewardship. Because sharing and reuse cross political boundaries, the stewards and disparate service consumers must collaborate to develop governance, semantic reconciliation and service utilization management policies and practices. Because adoption of the SOA shared-service approach will modify or replace existing and well-entrenched processes with complex, long-lived and cross-organization workflows, change planning and change management to prepare for and handle the change impacts become increasingly crucial skills and practices.

From Silo to Shared

Everyone now working in the SOA space agrees that SOA represents an evolutionary approach that will develop over time through numerous phases. When XML Web services first became technically feasible, we started on the SOA path. While we now find ourselves in the middle of the SOA evolution, we can barely conceive of where the path will eventually take us.

The first phase, tactical Web services, continues even as organizations transition to more advanced and complex Enterprise SOA phases. As early Enterprise SOA adopters have begun to discover, the increasing complexity stems not only from the technical challenges but also from the struggle to develop the sociology and methodology solutions required to deploy shared and flexible services and to integrate business processes on an enterprise basis. And, just as the SOA approach means sharing services and business processes, the Enterprise SOA approach also means that the business areas must share the responsibility and stewardship of their SOAs.

The organizations that will implement successful Enterprise SOAs will quickly learn to shift the SOA leadership from IT to the business areas. They will work out not just the technical solutions, but also develop the sociology and methodology practices required to evolve from local Web service silos to shared Enterprise SOAs.

(Paul Jacobson is the President of I/S RESOURCE GROUP (www.isrg.com), a consulting, education and training organization that assists IT and business areas to apply emerging information technologies and methodologies to achieve business objectives. Jacobson and his firm help plan develop and implement enterprise architectures and applications, including Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs), Web Computing, n-tiered Distributed Architectures, and BI/BA and BAM/BPM solutions. Contact him at pauljacobson@isrg.com.)