Inchoate Curmudgeon

Success with Enterprise SOA depends on the ability to develop and drive governance models that align business objectives with IT strategy. Given that many organizations struggle with operating IT in a way achieves business capability that extends beyond pure cost containment and reactionary service fulfillment, success with SOA should be enhanced by prior success with service reuse initiatives that develop these capabilities, with fewer risks than might be presented by very aggressive SOA focused projects.

Service reuse is the most successful when the focus starts with the most univerasally reusable underpinning services begging for standardization. Enterprises leave a lot of money and operational capability on the table by not starting here.

This has to extend beyond simple constraints on vendor package acceptance to standards governing all operational areas: configuration, deployment, backup and recovery, monitoring, operational management, etc.

Examples of where more needs to be done are centralized, homogeneous management of application server farms, host configurations, database instance management and so forth. Enterprises typically allow a lot of non-value added diversity in these areas. In contrast such diversity is almost universally disallowed in things like acceptable network protocols, mail services, network file services and so forth.

Although focus on these issues won’t implement the typical vision of SOA by itself, it will certainly form a basis for greater success based on the development of the required operational, business and program management capabilities, such as governance, service management, IT strategy and technical synthesis.

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