SOA Governance - Java SOA - page 727

Creating a SOA Roadmap

Problem

You want to build out your SOA in an organized, thoughtful manner, and be ready to address
the wide variety of concerns that come into play as you embark on your SOA journey.

Solution

Create an SOA roadmap.

Discussion

SOA is a kind of architecture, or, rather, an approach to systems integration that represents a
long-term strategy to realize an architecture. It takes a long time to build: as the SOA cliché
goes, you can't boil the ocean. Between figuring out services, security, registries, and repos-
itories; performing vendor selection; getting an ESB running; and advancing to technologies
such as business process management, rules, and service virtualization, there is a lot to do in
one lifetime. To get a picture of everything you need to do and the order in which you need to
do it that makes the most sense for your business, you need a roadmap.
A roadmap in general terms defines checkpoints along the path of a journey. So the first thing
you need to know is what you want out of SOA. Where are you going? Why are you employ-
ing SOA in your organization? What benefits, in concrete terms, do you hope to realize? What
is your target state? What is the dream architecture that you hope to have in place? Frequently
cited reasons for implementing SOA in an organization include the following:

Business agility Business agility

IT needs to be in step with the business, so that it can respond more quickly to changing
markets and business demands. Services can help you realize this by promoting reuse, a
clean and manageable infrastructure, and interoperability with a wide variety of systems.

Legacy modernization Legacy modernization

Companies that have been around for a long time may have lots of code that is 20 or 25
years old. In order to scale or take advantage of developer skills and new productivity and
automation tools, you may feel the need to modernize certain applications. Ripping out
and replacing lots of working technology, especially in business-critical systems, is often
a very costly and time-consuming proposition. This is aggravated by the fact that busi-
nesses don't often see the value (and indeed, sometimes there may not be enough value) in