SOA as a buzz word is well known and you can find several different articles out there that state what SOA is. However many technology executives still ponder on business benefits on moving forward with a SOA based solution and will implementing SOA take a long time.
SOA implementation usually is considered a time consuming task or a set of tasks with a lot of governance needed across the enterprise to reap the true benefits of SOA. With that follows analysis to paralysis state from some of most revered resources in organization which takes the breath out of SOA initiative even before its substantial benefits can even be thought through.
Truth of the matter is to successfully implement SOA, it has to start with only a couple of projects. SOA implementation as such will need to start with a set of guiding principles and these guiding principles shall grow and mature with the implementation of those projects. Once successful in those projects, the growth can be in a controlled organic fashion and let the over-arching governance slowly kick in.
SOA design principles:
SOA generally is based on two key principles of good business:
1. Delegate responsibility to the part of organization that’s best equipped to handle it and
2. Tell people what to do, not how to do it.
SOA, when designed with the above two principles, then simply becomes a collection of services that are atomic in nature using HTTP based web services or a set of REST based services where they are known for their usage and the underlying nature of implementation becomes agnostic.
Keeping these simple rules in mind is very important to a successful SOA implementation strategy.
SOA implementation as a task
SOA implementation as a task is not bigger than any project. In fact it is and should be considered as a subset of a project implementation. With the right set of guidance and resources, an SOA implementation can easily be made a part of project lifecycle with little overhead to the project.
Thus reaping rewarding benefits with reusable services, reduced maintenance, greater return on investment and increased efficiencies through the organization.
Morningview Technologies excels in providing design and architectural expertise for SOA based implementations across open source and commercial implementations such as TIBCO, IBM and Oracle-BEA. Hyzaar
