An SOA Center: Driving SOA Acceptance and Rollout

An SOA center can help to drive success in developing and rolling out an enterprise SOA. As a forum where business and IT specialists can collaborate, it can work to promote both SOA acceptance and Web services reuse across the company.

Lacking this kind of centralized SOA organization, one company, whose IT group increasingly deployed Web services without consulting the business units affected, ended up with Web services performance issues and a political problem.

Worst Practice: Rolling out Web Services without an SOA Center for Business-IT Collaboration

RayStar Industries, an indirect supplier to the Department of Defense and private industry of defense and aerospace components, has multiple product lines, in part because of corporate acquisitions. To provide a more flexible technical infrastructure and greater job efficiency, its IT group was increasingly deploying Web services throughout the various business units and was seeking a way to improve service reuse.

To gain control over the growing number of services, the IT team decided to employ a SOA registry. In design time, this would help keep track of services and metadata, facilitating service reuse.

With the aid of its new registry, IT began to roll out a large number of services—without really understanding their value to the organization as a whole or impact on the network. Rather than achieving the objective of service reuse and control, IT had a situation where some services with duplicate functionality were deployed and some services were being reused in unknown and unintended ways.

There were also unexpected service failures directly affecting end users, such as slowdowns in performance of existing applications, and other delays associated with bringing new capabilities online. As a result, business management—which had not been involved in the registry purchase decision—began rejecting much of the newly released functionality.

There were two underlying issues. The first was technical, the limits of a Web services registry. While the registry informed IT about services initially deployed and made them available to consumers, it couldn't provide visibility into Web services operation in the SOA runtime environment: how they were truly being used and by whom, where they being reused, and whether they were meeting performance goals.

To complement the registry, IT needed an SOA solution that could provide runtime business process visibility, including use of rogue services – that is, services used by unauthorized consumers and their effect on application performance. (This was, in fact, what was happening.)

The second problem was organizational: failure to synchronize IT with the business. If an SOA doesn't take into account business needs, goals, rules and corporate-governance requirements, a company will miss out on many SOA benefits. Worse, the business will not support or be satisfied with the SOA.

Best Practice: Establishing an SOA Center to Align IT with the Business

There are two sides to SOA: technical mastery and organizational discipline. At minimum, the business needs to participate in developing a roadmap of services that it can understand—and it must understand and buy into the benefits of those services.

Better yet, a company should establish an SOA center (also known as an SOA center of excellence or integration competency center). This is a forum where, among other activities, IT and business can collaborate on the SOA roadmap. In this way, an SOA center can institutionalize SOA acceptance and facilitate Web services rollout across the organization.

Progress Actional products and services can help companies deploy and maintain a successful SOA solution. Actional SOA management products provide visibility, security, and control of services and end-to-end business processes in the runtime environment. Actional also correlates IT metrics with their business context and actively aligns SOA operations with business criteria. Based on hundreds of SOA engagements, Progress also can advice companies on best practices and methodologies that transform technology into a "whole product" offering that delivers the business benefits available in SOA.

For More Information on SOA Centers

To learn more about best practices for aligning IT and business, including more details of who should participate in an SOA center, download "SOA Worst Practices Volume II: A Look at Governance."