SOA Value: What Makes a Service Valuable?

Previous tutorials have examined designing and rolling out successful SOA pilots as well as the steps required to migrate the SOA to the enterprise. But in order to have value, services on the network have to be locatable: in short SOA value is dependent upon users being able to find these services.

Furthermore, users have to be able to understand what a service does. And these services must be loosely coupled. Moreover, policies required by the users must be supported, and the services have to be trusted.

Service Reuse Enhances SOA Value

Too many enterprises are failing to take these factors into account when they create their services -- and this is leading to limited service reuse and, thus, minimized SOA value. In successful Web services initiatives, a governance program ensures that services have the attributes described here -- including extensive reuse.

SOA value is also achieved by consistency. To that end, checkpoints need to be implemented in the process to identify services that don't meet the enterprise's requirements. This step is mentioned as a last resort because IT doesn't want to find itself in the position of discovering that a service was developed incorrectly the moment before it is scheduled to move into production. Therefore, the process for governing service consistency needs to include design reviews throughout the lifecycle.

Prioritize to Achieve SOA Value

Prioritization is also essential. Most enterprises are unable to bring in all of the SOA infrastructure they would like to have early in their initiatives; this fact leads to the need to set priorities around when each element will be acquired, and to determine how capabilities that will be provided by each infrastructure element can be handled prior to the acquisition.

Making SOA work for the organization requires executive support -- as well as technical acumen. Thus, funding for SOA can be a challenge: one that cannot be resolved by an architecture group. Nonetheless, the architecture group can put forth the business rationale for SOA and work with executives to ensure that it is aligned with the business's needs. Through this process, IT can gain business support for the effort and demonstrate SOA value.

For More Information

Find out how to deliver and measure SOA value. Register to watch the free webinar, Implementing a Successful SOA Pilot