SOA Enterprise Migration

After a successful pilot program, comes the SOA enterprise migration phase. This tutorial sets forth a list of things IT needs to accomplish in order to make the SOA successful enterprise-wide.

When we think about making the full SOA enterprise migration, we can group the work into two major tracks. One is the architecture track, which is primarily technical. The other track is governance, which is a broad term that primarily concerns the processes and standards issues relating to SOA.

Business Strategy Drives SOA Enterprise Migration and "To-Be" Architecture

The topic of SOA architecture is very broad. And SOA itself is an architectural "style" that supports the creation of composite applications. Making SOA work enterprise-wide involves the creation of a SOA infrastructure to support what we refer to as a "service network." And although some organizations have taken the "Big Bang" approach to SOA, creating a SOA infrastructure is more commonly an incremental process of moving from an "as-is" enterprise architecture to a "to-be" architecture. Not surprisingly, the decisions driving the design of that to-be architecture should be based on what will best support the business strategy.

SOA Enterprise Migration Should Keep an Eye Open to Solutions

While logical architectures are created without reference to specific products that might implement some of the required functionality, the solution architecture toward which IT is working does need to take these products into account. Thus, it's important to understand the capabilities provided by SOA solution vendors. And because SOA architectures are intended to span the enterprise, they need to take into account the likelihood that different areas may -- for either rational or political reasons -- implement different products or models to achieve their goals.

The creation of a SOA enterprise architecture has to address a number of different domains like security, management and presentation. Enterprise architects should create domain-specific architectures to address these different areas. Further, the teams that create application architectures that make use of the SOA infrastructure can provide a starting point for the project teams to support the creation of consistent results.

Use the Standards and Approaches that Worked Best in the SOA Enterprise

During the pilot, the SOA team makes decisions on what standards will be used for transport, messaging, security, transactions and more. And during the enterprise rollout, it's important to revisit those decisions, confirm what worked well in the pilot, and identify the least-common-denominator approach that will support interoperability. IT should avoid forcing every group to make use of a large set of standards -- and instead focus on those standards that allow the use of services developed across the enterprise.

For More Information

Learn more about SOA enterprise migration. Register to watch the free webinar, Implementing a Successful SOA Pilot