There aren’t many successful or failed SOA stories to share since few have really managed to complete SOA adoption, but there are many enterprises that have started their journey in that field. As part of my work I have the opportunity to be part of several SOA journeys and although they are in the beginning stages there are already several lessons that we’ve learned. In all the SOA engagements that I was part of, we realized (sooner or later and sooner is better) that without three major foundations the building that we’re trying to build will collapse. Those foundations are CxO support in involvement, Semantics and a clear information ownership model. CxO support and involvement SOA isn’t just a technology or IT architecture, SOA is a change that impacts the entire enterprise. SOA adoption impacts the business domain of the enterprise, as well as the information, application and technology domains. IT reflects business needs therefore if the business won’t adopt services as a concept to run the business on, SOA adoption will be a failure. Business changes demand not only CxO support but also CxO involvement in this process. Without direct support and involvement of the CxO level, don’t even try to start your SOA journey. Semantics Semantics are essential for SOA. Without business and information semantics it will be impossible to create a SOA implementation. If your enterprise hasn’t any semantic model of the business and the information you won ' t have the basics to create services that supply business functions by using information as input and outputs. You will just have the foundation to build another Babylon tower. Creating semantic models might look obvious and simple but most enterprises don’t have one semantic model for business and information that (at least) most of the enterprise business units accept. Furthermore it is a complex and tedious process to build semantic models and support around them . I believe that without a framework or proven methodology this task gets even harder to accomplish. Whether it’s complex or not , without a clear and supported semantic model you’ll find yourself in a dead-end one way or another. Clear information ownership model Information is the core component with SOA. At the end of the day services reflect business capabilities that manipulate data. Most of the IT problems in the enterprise usually derive from situations where information is managed by two or more business units or is just an asset of one business unit. If we want to build true SOA implementation, Information ownership should be explicit and approved by all parties in the enterprise. Services are about manipulating data and transfering the results to prevent data silos and data duplications. Without agreements about information ownership we won’t be able to fix the root causes of the problems, therefore the problems will appear and surface in the course of our work.
