Datasheet

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APPLY SOA TO THE ‘‘RIGHT’’ CHALLENGES
SOA is not a solution for every challenge in your organization. SOA offers
tremendous business value when applied to the right areas. However, if you
apply SOA to the wrong challenges, you may end up creating more prob-
lems. Where are services, Web services and non-WSDL-described services
beneficial to your organization and what’s the difference between them?
When can an organization benefit from sharing an enterprise assets as op-
posed to building and maintaining their own silos of assets? How can your
enterprise benefit from sharing consistent information across business proc-
esses? How can real-time event services eliminate inaccurate data and data
latencies which can result in bad decisions and dissatisfied customers? The
point is to seek SOA opportunities where the fit of reusable interoperable
services returns the most value to the business, as dictated by the SOA strat-
egy being pursued. We recommend creating an SOA Opportunity Road-
map
TM
, or a short list of the high-value areas of your enterprise where SOA
and services solve immediate problems and offer great potential value. This
will become an ongoing aspect of your SOA maturation process, continu-
ally identifying and applying SOA concepts to new opportunities over time.
IDENTIFY AND BUILD THE ‘‘RIGHT’’ SERVICES
Without services, you cannot have an SOA. Furthermore, an SOA com-
prised of services with no business or organizational value is well nigh
worthless. Therefore, getting your services right is essential. What are the
right services? The right services support business and mission objectives.
SOA GOVERNANCE IMPLICATIONS
SOA governance provides the overall decision-making framework and
processes for determining how best to allocate and focus resources on
SOA initiatives. SOA governance should define the SOA principles
that align with strategic goals and imperatives, and that will ensure
effective application of SOA to appropriate problems or opportuni-
ties. The SOA Opportunity Roadmap is one device to help identify,
evaluate, prioritize and execute SOA-centric projects to support the
SOA strategy under the guidance of SOA governance.
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