Successful SOA implementation mainly includes the following eight types

The SOA alliance and CIO Magazine recently announced a list of winners of SOA case studies. All winners use SOA to successfully provide the value of business or task. It is noted that every SOA application instance has some common characteristics. To sum up, the successful implementation of SOA mainly includes the following eight methods:

1. Strong management support and powerful SOA propagandists

Each project is supported by the business department or senior IT department officials. This is important for promoting changes within the entire Organization and eliminating obstacles. Without high-level support, many SOA plans will never be driven by growth momentum, resources, and the benefits that allow IT departments to provide SOA commitments to business units. It should also be pointed out that the powerful SOA propagandists are very important for each of these award-winning SOA case studies. As a matter of fact, research shows that every time SOA propagandists leave the company, the future projects of the Enterprise will be at risk of failure or go back to the previous method of providing software.

2. Educate enterprises on the value of SOA

Each of these cases provides great value for the enterprise. In some cases, the return on investment reaches billions of dollars in years. To discover these unusual opportunities and build a business instance around these opportunities, it is very important to educate enterprises to understand the potential of SOA.

However, the key to the education business department is not to talk about technical issues with the business department, or even to mention the word SOA. On the contrary, business departments need to understand how to address these key business drivers (such as faster access to information, integration with customers and partners, and eliminating wasted business processes ), learn how it uses these new methods to help provide these drivers. The business department does not need to know how the IT department is doing this. They need to understand what problems SOA can solve and what business departments need to do to help it solve these problems.

3. establish a center of excellence

Each winning case study has a kind of center of excellence. Such a center of excellence can also be called by another name, such as the configuration control board. However, all winning case studies have some formal organizations responsible for governing SOA plans. Some enterprises already have ready-made enterprise architectures with IT governance functions. They only need to make some simple adjustments for SOA. Some enterprises do not have formal governance plans and must create an Organization with sufficient control capabilities to help provide ideal business results. The level of control and the scope of governance for each institution are unique. However, governance is a key factor for success for every successful project.

4. Have a well-defined business process and a scale-up plan

In each case, candidate services are found after a well-defined business process is established. In some cases, there are ready-made business processes. In other cases, you need to recreate some business processes before creating a service. In each case, this goal is first to have a subset of business processes, rather than doing this business process immediately. Each case study has a well-defined scope and outlook for future states.

5. Define a satisfactory level of work in the service

Many ideas come down to which service is important for key business drivers. Business services provide a complete business function. For example, a core business service is the shopping cart function. This goal is to make the shopping cart function play a role in all necessary functions, not just an inspection service. In this example, complete business services also need to be paid, communicate with transport partners, and handle discounts.

Most successful SOA implementations do not have a large number of commercial services. This is where many SOA projects encounter difficulties. They try to include everything in a service, whether or not they provide commercial value. There is also a large amount of overhead related to the establishment, governance, and maintenance of services. Successful SOA Implementation focuses on a small number of core business services. These services will provide real commercial value and will not waste time and money on services without any return on investment.

6. Quality assurance is the key

SOA creates various types of challenges for the Quality Assurance Department. Successful SOA implementation requires appropriate quality assurance best practices, such as load testing for each service. Performance, security, and governance testing should be part of your entire test plan to meet business and technical requirements.

7. It is difficult to achieve a return on investment that will be achieved over time.

SOA is not a technology. It is an architecture. Like any other architecture, value is gradually gained as the architecture expands and matures. Some enterprises are in the second or third phase of implementing the SOA plan and are receiving meaningful return on investment. Some enterprises are in the first phase of implementing the SOA plan and do not see a direct return on investment. However, these enterprises lay the foundation to maximize ROI for future SOA plans.

8. Provide a large amount of commercial value

Among all the cases, these award-winning case studies provide significant commercial value. No case study focuses on fixing IT infrastructure, or simply reducing development costs by reusing it. These aspects may have some side effects, but the business benefits are less valuable than the it benefits. In some cases, the benefits of business can benefit billions of dollars in a specified period of time.

In general, make your SOA plan conform to some of the above eight features, if not all of them. So far, many people have been talking about SoA failures. Now we have six great examples of successfully implementing the SOA plan. We should adopt the best practices for these jobs and use these best practices in our projects so that we will be promoted in next year's winning competitions.