Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has now been around for a number of years and is presently being actively used in many organisations. The focus has moved away from justifying SOA adoption towards successfully implementing SOA.

Object Consulting's Chief Technology Officer, Brett McDowall, suggests the increasing acceptance and understanding of the role of services is starting to change the IT landscape. Organisations have a range of business processes and functions which can be readily modelled as sets of activities which require services to implement, i.e., they fit well into the concept of an SOA. Another shift is the increasing adoption of business process management oriented solutions and their integral part in an SOA. This provides an added dimension for reuse and starts to offer the business more immediate and obvious benefits.

McDowall looks specifically at reference architectures and methodologies. At an organisational level, to achieve a moderate level of SOA maturity there will need to be important changes in maturity around the organisation’s approach to solutions’ delivery. Rather than the classic interaction-centric approach (whereby project requirements are documented through sets of use cases and possibly UI prototypes), the organisation must begin by starting with the underlying business processes a solution needs to support. Processes should be organised into and managed by domains – the boundaries of domains are not necessarily the same as the organisational structure

The article provides some specific guidelines for an organisation aiming for SOA maturity Level 3 (of a 5 Level SOA maturity model) in the areas of Architecture, Business Analysis, Design and Development, and the use of Tools.

Click on the PDF Version link below to download this article.