Planning for SOA using Enterprise Architecture Management Best Practices

Introduction

SOA has arrived on the scene at a good time. Most IT organizations are far enough in their maturation process to see themselves as providers of services to support the business. Without this self-image, SOA wouldn’t have a chance in bringing the benefits to the business that it has the potential to do. Surely there are some shops that follow SOA only in the context of consolidating routine technical administration tasks such as authentication, authorization, backup und recovery, security, messaging, integration and the like. Many others comprehend that SOA bestows the opportunity for IT to strategically position itself as a business partner (see sidebar) but, lacking a sound architecture planning and management process, can’t act on their enlightenment. They are overwhelmed at the perceived necessity of rewiring their entire architecture, indeed some fail already at the question ‘What architecture?’. Yet enough IT organizations have understood the true potential of structuring business processes into service portfolios and bundling technologies accordingly, making business processes more streamlined and flexible. These IT organizations have taken a lead in SOA initiatives and are proving their mettle as service providers contributing to business efficiency.
Here are some examples:

• IBM: 77 shareable and reusable services in production – ranging from authentication to order fulfilment … [enabling reduction of] its inventory of 16,000 applications in 1998 to 4,000 today.
• Wachovia Bank: SOA-enabled development of a high-performance modelling application shaving modelling time of invest ment deals from hours to minutes. SOA also enabled development of an equity desktop application in 90 days that traditionally would have taken 6 – 12 months to design and build from scratch.
• Hewlett Packard: implementing SOA has [resulted in] up to $70 million in savings [with] initial paybacks coming from consolidation, reduction of redundancy and reuse across services.
• Ameriprise: savings in millions of dollars in development costs through reuse of crucial business services.(Source: ‘Ten Companies Where SOA Made a Difference’, Joe McKendrick, ZD Net, December 17, 2006.)

“[The] impact of SOA is in the opportunity for IT to address the constraints that have hindered its support for business: increasing flexibility for business change, enabling multi-channel access to business functionality, and positioning for closer coupling between a firm’s business processes and those of its customers and suppliers. - ‘The Enterprise Architecture of SOA’, Forrester, Alex Cullen, February 2006.“

Enterprise Architecture Management from a SOA perspective: What’s changed, what hasn’t?

In companies embracing SOA, Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) is enjoying a surge in significance. The two are becoming so closely entwined that it’s difficult to say which topic is a subcategory of the other.

Best practice EAM already recognizes several of the issues involved in SOA and strategic planning products such as planningIT support these concepts:

• a single, central repository containing all planning-relevant information on all architecture artefacts as a comprehensive information base for effective IT planning
• thorough examination of requests for change to the architecture to eliminate redundant efforts and avoid negative impact to other system areas
• strict adherence to standards and guidelines to ensure progress towards the IT architecture vision
• transparent and measurable IT/business relationship issues to assess IT support for the business
• an architect roadmap defining the incremental steps on the way to the desired target architecture
• a collaborative process for cooperative planning and implementation

So that, in general, SOA does not require a new approach to enterprise architecture. SOA does confront the architecture team with new challenges in respect to services* (* In the remainder of this paper, the term ‘services’ implies business services as opposed to the routine technical services mentioned previously.), however, and in embarking on the SOA path the EA group often finds that

• business architecture is not structured for reusability
• the company lacks an enterprise-wide, uniform service classification
• services important to the enterprise cannot be readily identified
• deficiencies in the current service implementation cannot be readily identified
• services as inherent elements of the EA lack a governed process for their creation
• service creation and maintenance is distributed across the enterprise

This unsatisfactory situation is the catalyst for improvements in EAM, causing the EA team to intensify focus on certain issues such as

• understanding the business better and identifying the truly mission critical business processes
• improved IT/business alignment by advocating an EA approach to SOA which anchors business into the IT landscape
• strategic IT planning involving an evolutionary process with a vision and intermediary steps to get there

and strengthen discipline in areas such as

• implementing strict governance processes and standards in order to
• enforce service reuse
• avoid service duplication
• secure required service qualities
• maintaining a transparent, documented architecture despite the large number of EA elements needed to be handled in order to
• identify potential for service reuse
• perform thorough impact analysis

Above all, what has changed for the EA group is the enterprise’s expectations on it. In the metamorphosis of ‘service’ as a nebulous mode of behavior into ‘service’ as a precise digital transactional computation, enterprise architecture planning takes over as the logical interpreter between business and technology. The responsibility for designing and implementing services lies in the architecture and the EA group must guide the transformation of the business architecture so that it can be properly reflected in the enterprise architecture. The EA group must understand its responsibility in unifying the enterprise under the SOA umbrella as the reuse and reusability of services can only be guaranteed if an enterprise-wide SOA strategy is followed mandating an integrated, collaborative EA planning process.

This paper examines EAM best practices in the context of SOA –what EAM brings to the table and new developments for supporting the EA team in its SOA efforts. It will demonstrate support for these efforts by the strategic EA management and planning tool, planningIT.

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