Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

1.16. APPLY SOA TO THE "RIGHT" CHALLENGES

SOA is not a solution for every challenge in your organization. SOA offers tremendous business value when applied to the right areas. However, if you apply SOA to the wrong challenges, you may end up creating more problems. Where are services, Web services and non-WSDL-described services beneficial to your organization and what's the difference between them? When can an organization benefit from sharing an enterprise assets as opposed to building and maintaining their own silos of assets? How can your enterprise benefit from sharing consistent information across business processes? How can real-time event services eliminate inaccurate data and data latencies which can result in bad decisions and dissatisfied customers? The point is to seek SOA opportunities where the fit of reusable interoperable services returns the most value to the business, as dictated by the SOA strategy being pursued. We recommend creating an SOA Opportunity Road-map™, or a short list of the high-value areas of your enterprise where SOA and services solve immediate problems and offer great potential value. This will become an ongoing aspect of your SOA maturation process, continually identifying and applying SOA concepts to new opportunities over time.

SOA GOVERNANCE IMPLICATIONS SOA governance provides the overall decision-making framework and processes for determining how best to allocate and focus resources on SOA initiatives. SOA governance should define the ...