Management Strategies for SOA

Mike Kavis

Management Strategies for SOA

The SOA consortium has been running an annual contest for the best SOA Case Studies. Last year I attended the event and summarized the common characteristics of successful SOA implementations. This year's winners shared the same characteristics:

1. Strong executive level commitment
2. Educate the business of the value of SOA
3. Establish a Center of Excellence
4. Well defined business services
5. Completeness of services
6. Sound quality assurance
7. ROI realized over time
8. Deliver substantial value

If I put these characteristics into categories, I come up with people, process, technology, and business.
A good management strategy is to manage a roadmap that plots out key deliverables in each of these areas.

Let's start with people. One of the first things that needs to occur is an organizational readiness assessment. Is there a executive level champion with enough clout to push this initiative through? What skill gaps do both the IT and business staff have? Can the culture handle the changes required to to transform the way business and IT works? What are the road blocks? How will we communicate, to who, how frequently, and with what tools? What this boils down to is creating a organizational change management plan with a communication strategy being the most critical component. This plan should be one of the work-streams in the SOA roadmap and must be closely managed. Nothing derails an SOA implementation more than communication breakdowns and resistance to change.

Another critical work-stream in the SOA roadmap is the process or governance plan. In most cases, existing processes need to be adjusted to support an SOA initiative. It is critical to measure key metrics to ensure that the system is performing and meeting SLAs, the business is getting value from the services that have been built and deployed, and that design goals, such as reuse, speed to market, and cost reduction are being achieved. Creating a Center of Excellence (COE) is also critical to ensuring that only services that add value are built and that they are built in a consistent and appropriate manner. It is also important that the team responsible for governance take a business first approach and does not get bogged down in semantics. Setting up the COE and maturing the SOA governance model over time is a key management strategy. The goal should be to provide the right amount of governance at the beginning to apply enough control without slowing down the implementation to the point where business value cannot be obtained in a timely manner. As the amount of services grow and the amount of people who are assigned to work on these initiatives increase, the amount of governance should grow accordingly.

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