I drew the lucky straw to be a track manager at HP Software Universe. This meant I was tagged to organize all the sessions at HP Software Universe for our SOA track . The positive side of the administrivia was that in the process, I had the opportunity to review and hear some great presentations from our SOA customers who are making the journey towards effective SOA transformation. Here are some of the quips and gems that stood out for me: 1. One customer mentioned how for their organization, SOA is a tool within an Enterprise Architecture: The key message here is that you never do SOA for “SOA’s sake”. It’s a tool to help you achieve an architectural objective: agility, re-use, efficiency.
If you want to dig into this topic more, there is some interesting writing about SOA and EA here
2. One needs clear SOA transformation metrics to measure success: What is your SOA measured against? For one key customer, the clear metrics are 1) standards conformance and 2) business agility. Business agility is defined as the ability to see new business intentions, realize business changes and make improvements quickly.
To hear more about measureable benefits of SOA check out Tim Hall’s podcast
3. Don’t be surprised that one of the largest adoption hurdles is that SOA is fraught with “charge back challenges” -- In order for a group to adopt SOA it must be cheaper for the potential service consumer than to do it themselves. (This should be obvious) 4. How to manage versions effectively in a SOA? A best practice is to establish a time-based contract between service consumer and provider – allows the service provider to get consumers onto new versions, otherwise they will never move. 5. My favorite -- How to entice project teams to adopt SOA? Show them how SOA will grow their kingdom and make them a bigger king – appeal to ego, create a buzz – the more groups that use the service, the more successful the service provider, or the bigger the "kingdom". 6. Sometimes silos are not a dirty word. One customer started building out SOA in silos and is now connecting them when the organization has matured enough to handle it – the goal, build initial focused success, gain people buy-in, then expand scope 7. And since there are two sides to every story, that said, some silos must be broken from the get-go. For example, to have success in attaining SOA quality testing that works—you must have collaboration between development and QA – services change continuously during design, requirements definition, development and testing and dev and QA must have a dynamic feedback loop to get a positive result. 8. Finally a good quote ”you need SOA governance but it can’t be bureaucratic” Governance should make SOA easier not put up roadblocks. As the cliché goes..for many of these customers the carrot is proving more effective than the stick.
Posted
06-30-2008 9:34 PM
by
kellyemo