Management Strategies for SOA
By: Mike Kavis, CTO/Chief Architect, M-Dot
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Management Strategies for SOA
The SOA consortium has been running an annual contest for the best SOA Case Studies. Last year I attended the event and summarized the common characteristics of successful SOA implementations. This year's winners shared the same characteristics:
1. Strong executive level commitment
2. Educate the business of the value of SOA
3. Establish a Center of Excellence
4. Well defined business services
5. Completeness of services
6. Sound quality assurance
7. ROI realized over time
8. Deliver substantial value
If I put these characteristics into categories, I come up with people, process, technology, and business.
A good management strategy is to manage a roadmap that plots out key deliverables in each of these areas.
Let's start with people. One of the first things that needs to occur is an organizational readiness assessment. Is there a executive level champion with enough clout to push this initiative through? What skill gaps do both the IT and business staff have? Can the culture handle the changes required to to transform the way business and IT works? What are the road blocks? How will we communicate, to who, how frequently, and with what tools? What this boils down to is creating a organizational change management plan with a communication strategy being the most critical component. This plan should be one of the work-streams in the SOA roadmap and must be closely managed. Nothing derails an SOA implementation more than communication breakdowns and resistance to change.
http://www.soainstitute.org/articles/article/article/management-strategi...