Java Reference
In-Depth Information
Assigning Roles
Problem
There are a variety of roles specific to SOA development, maintenance, and governance, and
these do not necessarily map to your existing human resources. You need to map current de-
velopers, analysts, executives, and infrastructure team members to support your SOA work,
and you're not sure who you'll need.
Solution
As appropriate given the skills, backgrounds, and flexibility of the people you have or can
hire, consider filling the following roles:
▪ Enterprise architect
▪ Solutions architect
▪ Technical architect
▪ Service developer
▪ Service custodian
These are discussed in detail in the next section.
Discussion
You may already have people in place for some of these roles, such as enterprise architect. In
that case, making a slight adjustment to keep the special needs of SOA on their radar might be
all the updating for that role that's required. But let's take a moment to discuss each of these
roles in turn, to see what value they might add to your organization:
Enterprise architect
The custodian and ultimate decision maker of the overall architecture, enterprise architects
take a 50,000-foot view of general activities. This is a business role, and its primary func-
tion is interacting with other business executives. It is his responsibility to ensure that the
broad SOA efforts are in step with business goals, and that the SOA is helping increase
business agility. He will translate business goals into broad SOA objectives, set the overall
direction of the SOA, and ensure that the work progresses within the established architec-
ture for the organization.
