The SOA Architectural Challenges in Practice
by Murteza Salemi
Reflecting on my recent engagement within educational sector I touched and felt the SOA architectural challenges again. Going to the workshops to understand the requirements and business processes it was quite evident that the challenges for an SOA architect do not stop with solving only the technical sides of the SOA architecture. The architect must also coordinate and guide the enterprise’s collaboration between business processes, people, information, and technology to ensure the focus remains on achieving enterprise’s goals rather than anything else.
The organisation have a vision and key business drivers that when implemented through SOA it will require a consistent interpretation as it is put on the ground for development. Metrics and dashboards are tangible to business stakeholders to see their vision has translated to real effects.
The actual development of SOA will take place step-by-step and project by project. Services that are developed in one and today’s project must satisfy future requirements and need, and today’s project must be able to leverage the services developed in yesterday’s project.
Services present the capabilities and the structure of business processes, applications, systems, etc. One typical challenge faced in an organisation is that business processes are intertwined with legacy systems and applications and the obvious consequence of this tight coupling is that it is no longer possible to design one without changing the other. Thus, building SOA architecture must not be considered as purely technical exercise but it is also a business exercise that requires the active participation of key business stakeholders. The immediate impact of business involvement is validation and verification of business services required for development.
Building SOA architecture is a long term journey and should not interrupt the core business functionalities from delivering value and making revenues. SOA will not be built from scratch but it will be depending upon a set of processes and legacy systems. In practice this means that existing business processes and systems will evolve gradually into an SOA and changes are introduced incrementally and rigorously.
