Service Oriented Architecture For Dummies®

Chapter 16. Do You Need a SOA?A Self-Test

In This Chapter

• Gauging your business and industry's fitness for SOA

• Evaluating your technological readiness

• Staying on the good side of the law

• Assessing whether your work environment is SOA-friendly

• Tallying up your SOA score

Given what you know of SOA by your innate perspicacity and by your diligent reading of our book, we think you're equipped to try to determine whether your organization is ready for SOA.

Readers of self-help books and lifestyle magazines are no doubt familiar with the kind of self-test that supposedly can tell you whether you're a really loving person, a person who's ready for change, or someone who needs to get a life. Well, in this chapter, we try to help you evaluate your organization's need for SOA. We ask you ten questions about your company. You score your answers by using the standard 1-to-10 scale — if your organization is at the high end of the spectrum for the question, you might be approaching 10; if the question doesn't resonate with you at all, you might be closer to a 1. When you tally up your score, each question gets a certain weighting because some factors are more important than others. At the end of the chapter, we help you weight and calculate your score.

Question 1: Is Your Business Ecosystem Broad and Complex?

"What's a business ecosystem?" you ask. Well, just as no species is an island in this collective enterprise we call Earth, no company can go it alone. Companies buy from suppliers and sell to customers. ...