SOA - Focus Areas

Following are the 8 SOA Focus areas that Executives need to consider while adopting SOA.

1. Governance & Organization
2. Standard Bodies
3. Regulation & Compliance
4. Management (of Programs, Projects, Services, Infrastructure, etc.)
5. Security (could be considered as part of management - best broken out seperately)
6. Business Process
7. Development tools and Methodology
8. Deployment tools and Methodology

Based on my discussion with BEA there are 4 Organization patterns/models (listed in the white paper available at http://eudownload.bea.com/uk/events/soa/soa.pdf). These models could be considered as:

Centralized, Hierarchial, Federated & Partially Federated and these models are typically structured the same way the Enterprise is organized. For example is the business is highly-centralized - then so is IT. This structure would typically not change for adopting SOA across the enterprise. Forrester has an excellent research paper on this - which you may want to download from their site.

It is easier to achive the reuse benefits of services in a centralized model. The issues for non-centralized (most large enterprises) organization is the structure/process required to get the benefits of reuse. The missing solutiuon for this is a centralized Service Repository with a Google like search capability. To make this a productive tool - every project manager & business would have to comit to document and publish their objectives, process, requirements, design, etc. (all the sharable assets) into this repository. Such a respository will have to leverage technologies such as Search (Goole Appliance, Autonomy, Verity, etc.) & Conetent Management Systems (Documentum, Interwoven, FileNet, etc.). Ofcouse - Microsoft provides similar capabilities but have not reviewed their products.