SOA Web Services Journal has an interesting cover story: Focus on the "A" in SOA.
(If you cannot stand their busy, pop-up laden pages, here's the printer version.)
It's quite hard on existing enterprise architecture, but it emphasizes the critical importance of a functioning, relevant, forward-looking EA to support SOA.
The failure to focus on architecture during [the SOA development] process will
ultimately dilute the architecture beyond its ability to have positive
impact on the business. It is critical, especially with just such a
gradual architectural rollout, that the architecture design exists as
more than a static document. It must be a living
entity that evolves in coordination with changing business needs. This
makes the service-oriented enterprise architecture a perpetually moving
target. SOA is about anticipating the future, which is as much about
where architecture needs to be as it is about where it is today. That
is all the more reason to enact measures to ensure that all concerned
parties keep that target architecture in their sights at every step.
Balancing Act: Control and Chaos
Effective
enterprise architecture requires a balance between control and chaos.
It must be dynamic, interactive, and holistic. It must overcome project
myopia, spanning space by connecting projects to each other, and
spanning time by ensuring that projects are fully aware of what has
already been built, what needs to be built now, and what will be built
in the future.
The funded project model for SOA deployment underscores the need for
architects to confer on an ongoing basis with business managers in
order to understand their priorities, model the architecture to support
critical business needs, and clearly illustrate how technical assets
and services directly affect the ability of business managers to do
their jobs more effectively.
- Architects will have to translate their plans into the bottom-line
language of time and money that is spoken by business managers with
little technical expertise. Toward that end, dynamic graphical mapping
of project and service dependencies will bring the business
implications of IT projects vividly to life.
- Only a robust enterprise registry/repository that links the
management of services, business processes, and other software assets
with business objectives will provide the kind of long-term impact
metrics that IT must supply to guide the business-side decisions that
will shape the enterprise architecture (see Figure 1).
Creating the target architecture is only half the battle though. An
architecture that no one implements is no architecture at all. Ensuring
that developers adhere to the target architecture is absolutely
critical to a successful SOA. In this effort, the model for application
development in isolation is a recipe for disaster.
Bridging the Silos
Organizations that are adopting SOA must systematically bridge the gaps
that separate development silos: those groups of programmers working on
projects in almost total isolation, who often insist on building
everything from scratch. In the past, the effect of this
not-invented-here disease - a malady that afflicts so many corporate
development groups - was limited to a severe swelling in the amount of
time and money a company needed to spend on any given application. For
an SOA, the consequences are life threatening: isolated silos are to
SOA what kryptonite is to Superman.
It continues on to emphasize the importance of managing your XML Schema Definitions (XSDs), and concludes with a link to some best practices:
SOA Reality
As yesterday's monolithic IT infrastructure is deconstructed into a
dynamic matrix of loosely coupled services, the realization of the
dream of the agile, on-demand enterprise inches ever closer to reality.
The most important factor in that transformation is that SOA exists
within the larger enterprise architecture. The success of the SOA
effort depends entirely on the manner in which the enterprise
architecture is expressed, communicated, deployed, and governed (See Sidebar).
Some key best practices listed are:
- Put SOA within EA
- Establish a Common Services Group
- Create a Wiki
...
- Align SOA with the Business
As an interesting side note, the journal website has a nice blogging feature: click the blog button (on the regular article, not the print version) and you get text you can use, as well as a trackback URL.
Previously:
I put a big emphasis on the connection between EA and SOA in my presentation to the Manitoba SOA Symposium last year.
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