Enterprise Architecture: Current State survey

One of the working group from the Community of Practice of the SOA Consortium is working on the Enterprise Architecture of the Future - identifying the roles, skills, framework, governance, etc. impacting the Archtiecture team due to SOA. The team is currently in the process of understanding the current state and had developed a survey to capture this information. This will take anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes to complete and the SOA Consortium does plan to publish the findings soon.

SOA Consortium F2F meeting later this monrht

The first SOA Consortium face to face meeting shall be held on March 28th and 29th at La Jolla, CA and registrations are now open.

SOA Consortium member pulications available

The founder members of SOA Consortium members had published the SOA Practitioners Guide late last year. Our objective was to publish these as living documents and are now available at the SOA Consortium Wiki. All SOA Practioners are encouraged to register to this Wiki and modify the living documents, especially the Serives Lifecycle Stages section.

Please feel free drop a line to the SOA Consortium for additional information.

SOA Consortium is finally launched

After nearly 18 months of working on this, the SOA Consortium (previously know as the SOA Alliance) has finally been lauched.

The SOA Consortium is a new SOA advocacy group comprised of end users, service providers, and technology vendors, committed to helping the Global 1000 successfully adopt SOA by 2010.

The SOA Consortium mission, strategies, and tactics center on the following premises:

• Service-oriented architecture adoption is a key enabler for the 21st century enterprise
• Achieving the benefits of service-oriented architecture requires significant changes for both IT and business executives
• Service-oriented architecture is perceived by business executives as an IT integration and productivity story, rather than a business agility story
• Enterprise SOA practitioners would greatly benefit from a vibrant practitioner community to drive local, business-driven, SOA success, and to spur broader enterprise, and industry-wide, SOA adoption.

The membership form for the SOA Consortium is also available at the site and is currently providing free membership for 2007 to some organizations. Please register for the free periodic news letter and do drop an email at info@soa-consortium.org to see if you qualify for a free membership.

SOA Practitioners Guide

A few early adopters of SOA met last year back (August 2005) and agreed to establish an SOA community. This community was prelaunced at the Global Integration Summit (GIS) with the following proposed objectives.

• Get agreement on terminology for discussing SOA.
• Influence and deliver requirements to Standards Organizations and Vendors
• Provide education and rich understanding:
• Articulate & Promote Business Value Capture
• Disseminate Success Stories, Best/Worst Practices
• Offer templates, tool and methodology to ensure investment success

The same early adopters did publish the SOA Reference Architecture at the same event and continued working on documenting SOA best practice. As the SOA communitly was has not yet been formally launced early SOA adopters agreed to publish these best practices as SOA Practitioners Guides and are also available at my structured blog.

SOA Practitioners Guide (Abstract):

SOA is relatively new, so companies seeking to implement it cannot tap into a wealth of practical expertise. Without a common language and industry vocabulary based on shared experience, SOA may end up adding more custom logic and increased complexity to IT infrastructure, instead of delivering on its promise of intra and inter-enterprise services reuse and process interoperability. To help develop a shared language and collective body of SOA, a group of SOA practitioners created this SOA Practitioners Guide series of documents. In it, these SOA experts describe and document best practices and key learnings relating to SOA, to help other companies address the challenges of SOA. The SOA Practitioners Guide is envisioned as a multi-part colelction of publications that can act as a standard reference encyclopedia for all SOA stageholders.

The guide is available in three parts:

SOA Practitioners Guide Part 1: Why Services-Oriented Architecture? - This guide provides a high-level summary of SOA.

SOA Practitioners Guide Part 2: SOA Reference Architecture - This guide covers the SOA Reference Architecture, which provides a worked design of an enterprise-wide SOA implementation with detailed architecture diagrams, component descriptions, detailed requirements, design patterns, opinions about standards, patterns on regulation compliance, standards templates and potential code assets from members.

SOA Practitioners Guide Part 3: Introduction to Services Lifecycle — This guide introduces the Services Lifecycle and provides a detailed process for services management though the service lifecycle, from inception through to retirement or repurposing of the services. It also contains an appendix that includes organization and governance best practices, templates, comments on key SOA standards, and recommended links for more information.

Contributing SOA Practitioners:

• Surekha Durvasula, Enterprise Architect, Kohls
• Martin Guttmann, Principal Architect, Customer Solutions Group, Intel Corp
• Ashok Kumar, Manager, SOA Archtiecture, Avis Budget
• Jeffery Lamb, Enterprise Architect, Wells Fargo
• Tom Mitchell, Lead Technical Architect, Wells Fargo Private Client Services
• Burc Oral, Inidividual Contributor
• Yogish Pai, Chief Architect AquaLogic Composer, BEA Systems, Inc.
• Tom Sedlack, Enterprise Architecture and Engineering, SunTrust Banks, Inc.
• Dr. Harsh Sharma, Senior Information Architect, MetLife
• Sankar Ram-Sundaresan, Chief Architect e-Business, HP-IT

SOA Stakeholders

The industry as a whole has been attempting to define Services Oriented Architecture (SOA). The definition of SOA may wary based on the responsibility of the individual. It is therefore necessary to understand the responsibilities of the stakeholders before defining SOA. The following link to the document is an attempting at identifying the various stakeholders.

http://www.soablueprint.com/whitepapers/SOAStakeHolders.pdf

Enterprise Architects - Roles and Responsibilities

As companies are starting to adopt SOA, one of the questions they keep attempting to answere is "what are the roles and responsibilities?" of an enterprise architect. My thoughts on the role of an enterprise archtiect are available at http://www.soablueprint.com/whitepapers/EARolesAndResponsibilities.pdf