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Got agility? the five key steps to SOA success

 
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Service-oriented architectures help strategically transform IT processes, policies, software applications and infrastructure to support business and IT agility.

But achieving this transformation requires a paradigm shift involving people, organization and technology. It requires new processes for governance, lifecycle management, quality and operations.

“SOA is the blueprint for shifting IT budgets from maintenance to strategic business initiatives," says David Butler, chief SOA evangelist at HP. “SOA is a blueprint for how to achieve business agility, but you can't achieve it without practicing SOA.”

Butler identifies five keys to SOA success:

  1. Create a center of excellence staffed by business and IT resources that can define and standardize SOA best practices and assets across the enterprise
  2. Determine SOA governance policies and processes through the center of excellence
  3. Identify executive-level business initiatives and mine them for new business services through the center of excellence
  4. Establish the right SOA infrastructure at the application and data-center levels, including SOA-ready applications, middleware, and monitoring and management software
  5. Adopt best practices around project and portfolio management to create an efficient supply and demand process

SOA requires collaborative processes and visibility across the organization; trust in business services; support for security and performance policies; service level agreements; and definition of new roles and responsibilities to make sure the lifecycle of a service is properly maintained.

IDC research finds “as clients move up the SOA adoption curve and start to engage in broader enterprise-wide and more strategic engagements with a compounding level of business complexity, managing change with a focus on the people and organizational factors becomes increasingly critical.”1


Blueprint for the future

Enterprises are increasingly turning to SOA as the dominant enterprise IT architecture to:

Because SOA business services can be modified quickly, they can rapidly enable business and IT changes to address competitive market conditions, rapid business and IT change, and new regulatory and compliance requirements.

SOA can transform IT from a bottleneck and cost center into a value driver by becoming a key source of business agility and competitive advantage. SOA benefits packaged applications from companies such as Oracle®, Microsoft® and SAP; and line-of-business services such as those offered by online banking, retail and telecommunications service providers. SOA also provides an approach for a standard consumer-provider model for enabling interoperability in business and supplier relationships, as well as for new deployment architectures such as software as a service and Web 2.0.

Success requires an integrated business and IT approach with a clearly defined strategy for optimizing business outcomes.


HP services eases the transformation

HP can ease this transformation with standards-based, platform independent products and services and integrated enablement solutions for SOA governance, quality and management.

The HP SOA strategy focuses on a series of business-guided steps that transform the IT architecture and applications based on the needs of the business. It is an incremental process that shows a clear business return at each stage.

HP addresses three main customer entry points for SOA: enabling and standardizing SOA, modernizing applications, and implementing line-of-business services. HP SOA and application services together can help customers:

HP’s open, standards-based products and services help accelerate and drive SOA adoption across companies’ applications and platforms to deliver better business outcomes while safeguarding against risks. HP Services consultants assess SOA readiness, create an SOA strategy that meets business objectives, set up effective governance and can develop and implement SOA business service projects.


1Source: IDC study, “SOA-Driven Organizational Change Management: A Market Trends and Vendor Landscape Analysis of Major Service Players to Address This Emerging Opportunity,” Doc # 204727, December 2006.
Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates.

Microsoft is a U.S. registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.

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