Preparing for SOAPouria Ghatrenabi

Based on IBM SOA Certificate Learning Objectives

Learning Objectives

• Describe the elements of SOA governance that need to be addressed during the preparation for SOA.

• Understand the importance of documenting business issues, drivers and goals when preparing for SOA.

• Capture and assess IT issues, drivers, and goals (including metrics and KPIs.)

• Describe the people, organizational, and technology factors that impact readiness for SOA and its success.

• Describe the steps for SOA adoption (including adoption roadmaps and maturity assessments.)

• Identify barriers to SOA adoption.

• Describe points of entry into SOA.

• Describe the importance of securing executive sponsorship and solving funding issues for SOA adoption.

Elements of SOA Governance for SOA Preparation

SOA Adoption Process

Ref: Buecker et al. (2008), p405

• SOA adoption provides an iterative and incremental process and guidelines

• There are two primary perspectives:

Strategic Vision Perspective

• Describes the business and IT statement of direction,

• Can be used as a guideline for decision making, organizational buy-in, and standards adoption.

Project Plan Perspective

(Tactical Perspective)

• Refers to implementation projects to meet immediate needs of the current business drivers

Ref: Buecker et al. (2008), p405

Maturity Assessment and Documenting Goals

• Defining the strategic vision starts with assessing the current maturity,

• IBM Service Integration Maturity Model (SIMM) can be used to help assessing multiple dimensions (business, methodology, and technical),

• After the assessment, the business must establish targets,

• This includes documenting important goals and metrics for transition across the maturity dimensions,

• It is important to have regular checkpoints to reassess the vision.

Ref: Buecker et al. (2008), pp 405-406

Business Issues, Drivers, and Goals

Business Issues

Management doubting or questioning SOA because it's a new idea that's more IT-driven than business-driven.

Defining the strategy and level of adoption, taking into account the current situation of the organization and how ready it is to adopt SOA.

Mapping process to services.

Ref: Mabrouk (2008)

Business Issues (continued)

Lack of knowledge about SOA and what it can provide.

The misconception that SOA is an IT architecture method only, which can lead to neglecting the critical role of governance.

Underestimating IT business value.

Ref: Mabrouk (2008)

Business DriversDrive a business' return on investment (ROI), with reduced implementation costs through adopting standards, reuse, exposing services, and integrating with partners.

Decrease time to market by reusing assets and incorporating partner-provided services.

Increase the visibility of IT assets and their alignment to the business goals.

Improve flexibility both internally in communication and externally in dealing with partners.

Provide more efficient processes by reusing IT assets and leveraging standards.

Promote business agility and the ability to adapt easily and quickly to business and market changes.

Reduce costs throughout the organization.

Ref: Mabrouk (2008)

IT Issues, Drivers, and Goals

IT Issues

• Changing the existing tailored systems into standards-based services.

• Management, governance, and control of services.

• Security challenges of distributed systems.

• Reliability of new systems versus the existing, dependable systems.

• Optimizing and unifying the existing asset to remove redundancy.

Ref: Mabrouk (2008)

IT Drivers Adopting standards.

Ensuring high QoS.

Reuse of existing IT assets.

Loose coupling of services.

Independence from a certain

provider or partner.

Ref: Mabrouk (2008)

SOA Readiness and Risk Management

• Readiness and risk assessment is the first government body action.

• The kind of assessment should balance the vision of the SOA based solutions with the delivery capabilities of IT Department.

• It includes both business and IT readiness.

• The assessment suggests business cases and action plans

Ref: Bieberstein et al. (2006), pp70-71

Ref: Bieberstein et al. (2006), p71

SOA Adoption Roadmap

SOA Adoption Roadmap

Initial AdoptionLine of Business

AdoptionEnterprise Adoption

Enterprise-and-Partner-Network

Adoption

Ref: Bieberstein et al. (2006), p66

Ref: Bieberstein et al. (2006), p67

Initial Adoption

• Start with technology validation and readiness assessment to reduce risk and increase SOA commitment

• Includes early pilot tests consisting of creating and exposing services from business operations

• Results of the pilot tests are used for an early validation of following decision points (Next Slide…)

Ref: Bieberstein et al. (2006), p66

SOA Initial Adoption Decision Points

Capacity to transform existing legacy systems

• Including technical solutions such as messaging, adapters, and connectors

Non-functional requirements capacities

• Including performance, security, manageability, and availability tooling

The organizational structure required

• To support organizational evolution, address skills gaps and institutes governance structure

Ref: Bieberstein et al. (2006), p66

Line of Business Adoption

• The business line is selected based on agility and flexibility value

• If the organizational issues are already identified, a broader initial assessment is conducted to identify metrics and KPIs

Ref: Bieberstein et al. (2006), p66

Enterprise Adoption

• Involves complete prioritization of projects based on business value followed by the architecture and implementation phase

• Enterprise activities need to be categorized into separate business domains and components

• An enterprise SOA council need to be established at this stage

Ref: Bieberstein et al. (2006), p66-67

Enterprise-and-Partner-Network Adoption

• A brooder transformation of existing or new business models

• Involves not only the enterprise, but also its partners, suppliers, or customers

• Any service provider, consumer, broker, aggregator, matchmaker, or any combination initiative will follow the typical IT project development phases in RUP.

Ref: Bieberstein et al. (2006)

Points of Entry into SOA

Business-centric Starting Points

People: Productivity through collaboration

• Start by building a view of a key business process by aggregating information to help better decision making,

• The next steps are tighter management of performance with alert-driven dashboards that link to more processes.

Process: BPM for continuous innovation

• Start by modeling an under-performing process, remove bottlenecks, and then simulate and deploy the optimized process,

• Next, create flexible linkages between multiple processes across the enterprise and outside the firewall,

• Then, monitor the process to measure and track performance.

Information: Delivering information as a service

• Start by discovering and understanding information sources, relationships, and the business context.

• The next steps are to expand the volume and scope of the information delivered as a service across internal and external processes.

Ref: Buecker et al. (2008), pp 406-407

IT-centric Starting Points

Connectivity: Underlying connectivity to enable business-centric SOA

• Connectivity provided through SOA has distinct, stand-alone value

Reuse: Create flexible, service-based business applications

• Identify high-value existing IT assets and service-enable them for reuse,

• Satisfy remaining business needs by creating new services,

• Finally, create a service registry and repository to provide centralized access and control of reusable services.

Ref: Buecker et al. (2008), pp 406-407

Core Business-centric and IT-centric Starting Points

Ref: Buecker et al. (2008), pp 406

SOA Adoption Barriers

SOA Adoption Barriers

According to a survey of six hundred

senior executives

#1 Shortage of skills.

#2 The difficulty in

justifying the ROI of SOA projects.

Ref: IBM (2015)

Other barriers include

Old-fashioned IT practitioners insisting on old-fashioned waterfall development cycles.

The notion that complex systems are better, and fear of the unknown.

Overlooking the importance of architects and considering them theorists. Architects are instrumental in SOA.

Organizational resistance to adopt an SOA model. SOA requires cooperation from all groups in the organization.

Ref: Mabrouk (2008)

Executive Sponsorship and Funding SOA Adoption

Empowerment and Funding

• Underfunding can lead to small-scale implementation Web services rather than a move toward the benefits of a true SOA.

• Successful SOA project needs strong support of senior executives, identified funding, and proper empowerment of governance body.

• Organization should avoid a weak governance body that has a more consultative role and cannot enforce its recommendations.

• The governance body needs to have proper practical control of project funding

Ref: Bieberstein et al. (2006), p70

References

• Bieberstein, N., Bose, S., Fiammante, M., Jones, K., & Shah, R. (2006). Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Compass-Business Value. Planning, and Enterprise Roadmap, IBM developerWorks.

• Buecker, A., Ashley, P., Borrett, M., Lu, M., Muppidi, S., Readshaw, N., & others. (2008). Understanding SOA Security Design and Implementation. IBM Redbooks.

• IBM. (2015, December 12). IBM Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Frequently Asked Questions. Retrieved December 12, 2015, from http://www-01.ibm.com/software/solutions/soa/faqs.html

• Mabrouk, M. I. (2008, September 5). SOA fundamentals in a nutshell. Retrieved December 12, 2015, from http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/tutorials/ws-soa-ibmcertified/ws-soa-ibmcertified.html

• McBride, G. (2007, March 15). The Role of SOA Quality Management in SOA Service Lifecycle Management. Retrieved from http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/mar07/mcbride/