SOA Recommendations

An Aberdeen Group report lists several SOA recommendations for optimizing the SOA application lifecycle and reducing its costs, including using both SOA operations management and governance solutions. These recommendations are based on a survey of more than 200 companies and their SOA challenges and successes, ("Management and Governance: Planning for an Optimized SOA Application Lifecycle," March 2007).

The Aberdeen survey investigated the results of IT investments in the areas of SOA operations management, design and operations governance, and changes in project management, development, testing, and application lifecycle management tools. Based on criteria such as SOA technology, processes, knowledge, and metrics, Aberdeen divided survey respondents into "best-in-class" (for the best-performing 20% of responding companies), average (for 50% of respondents that represented the norm), and "laggard" (for the 30% of respondents with the lowest performance).

Key Findings: The Basis of Aberdeen's SOA Recommendations

Aberdeen looked at the results from this survey in conjunction with surveys from more than 950 companies in 2006, which showed that between a third and a half of these companies were having trouble getting SOA-enabled applications into stable deployment. The 2007 survey subsequently showed the reasons for these problems to be inexperience aggravated by inadequate tools for SOA management and governance to handle the IT complexity of an SOA. Specifically, prior IT technology could not deal with the new design, testing, and operational performance issues of an SOA.

Interesting findings driving Aberdeen's SOA recommendations included such statistics as:

• The "best-in-class" were 33% more likely than the others to have two or more years of experience with SOA technology.
• Over 80% of the "best-in-class" have implemented automated solutions both for SOA management and SOA governance, typically using third-party software.
• Most "best-in-class" have design-time governance and reuse policies to minimize SOA application costs.
• Around 68% of the "best-in-class" are receiving positive ROI on their SOA investments and lower application development. A full 77% of survey participants overall have not yet received any SOA payback.

SOA Recommendations for Improving ROI

Based on these findings, especially, the common practices of the "best in class," Aberdeen offers the following general recommendations:

• Get focused SOA training for the entire IT group, not just specialists, and use outside services where appropriate. Survey results show that experience counts.
• Design in SOA management and governance. Operations management and governance software are both important and have proven their worth at "best in class" companies. What's more, it is more economical to design-in SOA management and governance, including operations management, service reuse policies, and security, rather than to add them on afterwards.
• Focus on application lifecycle costs, including establishing appropriate methodologies and policies for service reuse to drive lower cost of ownership.

Implementing Key SOA Recommendations with Help from Progress Actional

Progress® Actional® products can help companies with SOA operations management and support SOA governance as well. Progress Actional for SOA Operations provides end-to-end visibility into the SOA network, across services executing on distributed, heterogeneous computing resources. It enables companies to manage operations, including troubleshooting problems; to gain insight into service dependencies and usage to help plan for system capacity when reusing services; and to support governance solutions with information on actual SOA usage and performance.

In addition, Progress Actional for Active Policy Enforcement enables alerts on security, compliance, and business policy violations—for runtime governance.

To Learn More about Aberdeen Group's SOA Recommendations

To figure out how your company performs according to Aberdeen's "best in class," average, and "laggard" classifications and get more specific recommendations on how your company can improve SOA ROI, read "Management and Governance: Planning for an Optimized SOA Application Lifecycle" (Aberdeen Group, March 2007).