Considering your SOA journey? Be aware of SOA Pitfalls
One of the fundamentals about SOA that every enterprise needs to understand is where they stand today before starting the SOA journey – are they ready to take the plunge? Understanding this would give a quick overview of the organisations readiness and maturity of SOA. Thereby ensuring that the common SOA pitfalls are avoided and right strategy and associated programme/initiatives are identified for starting SOA journey for the organisation.
In this blog, I would quickly touch upon the most common SOA pitfalls. The list looks very common, but on the ground the SOA team tend to more often ignore these common ‘must to do’ things due to the high visibility and demand (to deliver against a tight deadline) of the SOA initiative and excitement to work on the cutting edge technologies.
- Starting too big and starting at the wrong place/time. Before beginning the SOA journey, one needs to ensure that the right initiative is identified to manage the expectation of SOA outcome. For example, achieving SOA as part of a high profile time critical business transformation program would be the wrong place. Another situation could be trying to do SOA as part of a program which is already late in the solution delivery process.
- Isolated technology focus (e.g. Buying the full range of SOA products right at the beginning of SOA journey even though all those are not required at the beginning and without the processes and governance in place)
- Isolated architecture focus (e.g. Focus only on the integration layer/business services, No focus on infrastructure services)
- No formal central governance/competency group (CoE or centralize SOA team) and ownership of services. This creates scenarios like ‘unregulated’ development of services without checking reusability leading to redundancy and duplication of services (violates the core principles of SOA)
- Not adapting (or enabling) the operations and support model to support/leverage SOA (Impact on service management areas: Incident Management, Release Management, Configuration Management etc)
- No systematic Service strategy (Service planning) and design e.g. Service design without proper business modeling
- Strategy to measure the value of SOA and report to the stakeholders is absolute must. Not having a plan to measure would be disaster as the value of the SOA may not be clearly visible without the right data (number of time reused, reduced development time, faster response to business etc.) handy
- Making SOA high visibility and demand sponsorship without demonstrating the value (creating a business case for SOA is always a challenge). Ideal approach sometimes is to do mix of bottom-up and top-down. SOA can be introduced in "stealth" mode (for the business) without creating too much distraction.
- Not articulating the business value/impact of SOA (direct tangible links to business objectives) and presenting it purely for architectural purity. This limits the business sponsorship and funding
And at the end ‘Governance’ is KEY to successful SOA. Through an on-going governance process, organisations need to measure how far one is from the SOA goals and what is going good or bad. Having right governance in place, all or most critical pitfalls of SOA could be addressed. Lets define the SOA governance and make it work – you are all set for SOA!
