"We didn't start the fire ... it was always burning since the world's been turning ..." [Billy Joel 1989]. Is SOA the "Same Old Architecture?" or is it "Simply Over Ambitious?" Let's apply SOA's arsenal:: XML, BPM, Services, SOAP, Web Services - to the real world and find out. Let's put out some fires.

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Ready for the SOA Journey: Check Your SOA Maturity

One of the fundamental things about SOA that every organisation needs to understand is where they stand today before starting the SOA journey. This would quickly give an overview of the organisations readiness and maturity for the SOA journey. Organisation should start finding out the answers for few basic questions:

  • Do you have enough buy-in from Business, IT and other key stakeholders and of course the right business case to adopt SOA?
  • Do you understand your (organisation/BUs) current SOA maturity and opportunities for improvement?
  • What does it mean when it comes to adopting Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) – Organisationally (People, Process, Governance) and Architecturally? Please refer to my earlier blog – Making Your SOA Journey Successful
  • Do you have enough appetite to invest on SOA and wait for the benefit to come-in? SOA can not be achieved overnight – it’s a long journey.
Understanding the real health of the SOA of any organisation is a two step process.
  • Pre-assessment
This should really focus on the high level strategic directions at organisation level rather than getting into nitty gritty of actual organisational SOA capabilities. One needs to find out if the basics are in place from SOA point of view
    • SOA Business Case: How SOA is going to reap benefit for business. Having strong case to improve only IT is not big enough for SOA
    • Understood the benefit of SOA by the stakeholders: Tangible and intangible
    • Have buy-in from all the key stakeholders
    • Is there a SOA strategy at Organisation/BU level

Based on the findings of the pre-assessment, a decision to move ahead with the next phase (full blown Assessment) would be taken. In case of missing business case and lack of buy-in from the key stakeholders – the focus would be to create a business case and at the same time institutionalise the benefit of SOA within the enterprise. Without getting these two in place, there is no real benefit of trying to understand the current SOA capabilities through a thorough assessment.

SOA Maturity Model

  • Assessment
Once you have done the preliminary checks and made sure the organisation have a business case for SOA, all the key stakeholders are in sync and understands the benefit of SOA, it’s time to go and unearth the goods and bads around SOA within the organisation. The assessment goes deep inside into your capabilities around the following dimensions and identifies gaps followed by a set of recommendations to achieve higher level of SOA maturity.
    • People
    • Process
    • Architecture: Includes Business, Application, Information and Technology (inline with TOGAF)
    • Governance
    • Services
    • Engagement, Delivery & Operations

At the end of the Assessment phase, along with the key findings and recommendations, SOA Maturity of the organisation is defined using Infosys’ SOA Maturity Model (please refer to the presentation).
 
With targeted recommendations for improving your maturity level, the Infosys SOA assessment framework/tool can help you unlock the full value of SOA.

For whole set of SOA offerings from Infosys, you can visit http://www.infosys.com/soa

 

Posted by Shubhankar Sumar on November 17, 2008 06:57 PM |

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Comments

Is the implementation time of SOA longer or shorter for small business considering that smaller organisations decision making process is quicker compared to large enterprises?

Posted by: Roshan | March 11, 2009 12:44 PM

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