Proficient in SOA (i): Building a service portfolio

Although service-oriented architecture or SOA is still new, many companies are increasingly recognizing the need to adopt an SOA approach as a way to execute solutions that meet business needs. A key step in adopting this approach is to build a portfolio of reusable services.

SOA represents a fundamental shift in the way new applications are designed, developed, and integrated. It also simplifies the development of enterprise applications into modular business services that can be easily integrated and reused.

One of the major benefits of SOA is narrowing the gap between business and IT. As part of the demand gathering exercise, the alignment of business and technology requirements with the organization's key business objectives related to the project will help to ensure that the project is synchronized with the business requirements.

The motivation to start building a service portfolio stems primarily from the awareness of the need to maintain consistency between business requirements and IT projects. In general, the process begins by initially identifying the required services and then developing and classifying the services and resources on which they depend (such as policies that define specific business rules). Ideally, this results in a service-oriented business application that can be modified and reused to meet the changing business needs of the enterprise.

While there are many issues to consider when implementing an SOA (such as orchestration of business processes, development of the user interface, and infrastructure to support security and performance), getting a service portfolio is logically the first step. In this section of the "Proficient SOA" series, you can get an overview of the framework used to build a service portfolio.

SOA Management driven Portfolio building

It is often the people who are most concerned about SOA management-related issues that are actively driving the creation of the SOA portfolio. Ideally, this "management committee" should be an intersection of related groups, including business process owners, system architects and developers.

SOA management is a broad topic that deserves to be written and discussed. However, here we might summarize it as "a framework for integrating the flexibility of SOA with the control and predictability of traditional IT architectures".

SOA management generally covers the following areas in this article:

Lifecycle management of services and related resources

Relevance Management

The application and management of the strategy

Security and Run-time policy execution

Availability of services

Service Supply

The importance of implementing a management platform that manages the growing portfolio of services is much more than the improvements required for the technology infrastructure and run-time environment.

For any management plan, the primary goal is to minimize risk by defining an SOA strategy that builds management within its core. An managed SOA can result in the following consequences:

Interrupted process because the published service does not fully meet service-level requirements

Help desk and onsite service calls soar due to service problems and failures, resulting in increased support costs

Lack of interoperability, creating an island of business services and facing the challenges of a traditional, tightly coupled architecture

Inability to meet compliance requirements because of the inability to associate primary policies with services

Security vulnerabilities created by allowing arbitrary access to data and services