Consulting Services

Strategic SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) Management

Many large or complex IT organizations are keen to adopt SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) to drive IT agility by consolidating multiple redundant applications into a single service or to provide a single service to multiple business areas. By bundling large portions of technology supporting important business processes such as "credit check" or "customer record", SOA promises to give large corporations a portfolio of services that can be reused for other business processes. This aims to reduce application development time and costs and increase quality through use of common standards.

SOA can only deliver these benefits through carefully planned enterprise architecture and consistently enforced governance procedures. Service reuse and adaptability depends on the level of architectural planning that surrounds the specific service. For example, a service has more chance for reuse if it is developed as part of a broad SOA strategy that includes uniform development methodologies, service taxonomy and integrated set of business function libraries managed by a centralized architecture planning staff and business analysts. Their role is to examine processes across the company and incorporate the unique needs of the business units into the design of the service. If a service isn't designed with knowledge of how other parts of the organization may want to use it, it's unlikely that those groups will adopt it.

Often the most significant short-term challenge to extending a SOA isn't the technology used to expose the services, but rather the processes and organizational structures that are associated with managing and operating it. Here too, the role of enterprise architecture management plays an important role in creating a successful transition to SOA.

Whether services are to be provided internally or by external partners, priority services need to be planned and documented in terms of their logical behaviours and their different versions. Decisions also need to be taken about the required level of granularity at which services are bundled and architected. These steps are the precursor to the subsequent SLA (Service Level Agreement). The provision of services also needs to be tightly coupled with the IT cost management of the enterprise allowing for transparent service charges that cover the real cost incurred. A key measure of SOAs success, are performance evaluations to ensure that the services being provided are meeting the expectations of the consumer.

SOA describes a comprehensive management paradigm that address how processes and the IT landscape are managed in enterprises. Like all strategies, SOA is based on specific concepts and methods:

The term SOA should be understood first and foremost as a management concept from which a system architecture concept is derived:

1. The management concept strives to make the IT more agile and responsive to changes in business requirements by aligning the IT infrastructure more closely with business processes.
2. The system architecture concept makes IT functions and support available in the form of services.

In this context a service is defined as a function that can be used via a standard interface. The primary goal with SOA is to transform historically grown, heterogeneous system landscapes so that they are more agile and responsive to changes in business processes.

Service Offering

To implement SOA as an architecture concept for IT planning and documentation the following steps are required:

1. Iterative approach to define domains ie. creation of a model with objects contained in the application portfolio and their relationships to one another
2. Specification of services as bundled functions for the support of business units
3. Mapping and evaluation of the existing processes and applications to the business function library
4. Analysis and identification of action items

To implement these steps alfabet offers the following services:

Create and set up domain model

• Prepare and conduct workshops and interviews to set up the domain model
• Provide structured and visual representation of the domain
• Step-by-step consolidation and refinement of the model
• Evlaution of the business relevance of each of the domains

Specification of Services

• Perform analysis of information pertaining to the business process model
• Perform analysis of the functionality of central applications
• Provide specification of services and their associations to domains.

Mapping to business architecture

• Document the relevant business processes, business objects and organizational structures
• Document the relevant application portfolio
• Route and evaluate the delivered service support via the application system.
• Perform gap analysis to determine the required service support

Analysis and Identification of Action Items

• Prioritize domains
• Identify action items on the basis of application analysis, redundancy analysis, as well as an analysis of process support and cost
• Evaluate weak points to be considered in further decision making and planning

Benefits

• Transition to a service oriented architecture that:
  • can easily be aligned to new business requirements (flexibility)
  • is reusable
  • can be installed in stages
  • is aligned with business processes

• Identification of functional overlaps in the existing application landscape as well as areas where IT support is inadequate
• Cost benefits as a result of optimization of the IT landscape
• Faster response and turnaround times for business requirements
• Step-by-step restructure of complex application systems