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Hexaware phased approach to realize SOA |
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In adopting an SOA strategy, IT professionals are not willing to just replace their existing infrastructure due to cost and complexity. Instead, they are willing to expose existing business applications as services so they can be used in other business processes and applications. As a result, the core of SOA success involves an integration layer that supports dynamic interactions across services in a heterogeneous environment.
This integration layer must support the continual evolution of existing services and the rapid addition of new ones as the business grows to address new customers and partners while insulating the service consumers from changes at the service end points. The challenge, here, is the unique characteristics of each system in a domain that demands customized technology solutions. In a highly competitive industry, centralized controls are required to eliminate redundancy, while the speed and accessibility of the applications are increasingly important. To achieve the above mentioned challenges, a phased approach with key focus on enterprise integration, Service virtualization and reuse and Service Orchestration is suggested. |
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Need for SOA maturity Model |
To increase the flexibility of adopting SOA in an organization, there should be a defined path. As companies undertake the specific paths appropriate to their needs, they can co relate their paths with the maturity model to see the organizational needs, technology needs, and goals as they move up the levels of SOA maturity.
At lower levels of maturity, individual project teams define their own architecture using nonstandard techniques. These techniques lead to non-reusable solutions that are difficult to manage and do not adapt to agile business changes. As the organization matures to Level 3 and 4, a strong Enterprise Architecture (EA) group presence emerges that acts like a governing body for architectural principles. Elements of a reusable architecture appear, and are flexible to the needs of each Line of Business (LOB) that it serves. This solution tends to be effective, provides some level of interoperability, and paves the path toward service orientation.
Many large organizations consider adopting SOA, but do not know how to get into the SOA wagon. For this, a need for assessment of the organization is required. To assess the current status of an organization and to know their current maturity level, a logical strategy is needed to decide on where to reach, and how to build a road map from there. A maturity model defines a specific number of levels an organization can be fit into. The adoption path for SOA can be defined within 5 steps or 5 levels.
An SOA Readiness Assessment needs to be done for an organization to know the SOA maturity level through which it helps an organization to understand where exactly it stands. When this assessment is complete, the organization will have the information on the maturity level details which will define the best path to an SOA for the benefit of the organization towards a successful SOA implementation as depicted in Fig2. |
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Level 1: Envision
In this level, the organization may decide to commit to an SOA implementation. It usually starts with an initial project where new functionality is implemented to meet business needs that are directly aligned with the SOA initiative. At this level, the SOA concepts are introduced, initial drafts of SOA reference architecture are defined, and users learn about SOA-related standards. The scope involves pilot projects, small number of services and R&D experimentation.
Level 2: Elaborate
Business people get an awareness of SOA and buy in to the implementation of the SOA initiative to achieve IT cost reduction and control. Organization functions become stronger and mature, including control policies, standard processes, business methodologies, and run-time governance. At this level, organization business units will institutionalize the use of SOA. The multidisciplinary team created in maturity level 1 should be expanded, with the architecture group providing the leadership to handle more SOA projects. The scope involves web enabling applications within the enterprise.
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Level 3: Execute
Implementation of service virtualization, service composition, orchestration, and choreography in the SOA technology stack using appropriate levels will be reached at this level. Policies and services will be governed at change time. Each business unit involved should also create an SOA project management office that defines and maintains the standards and principles of project management processes within the unit. The scope involves multiple integrated applications – business processes across business units / enterprise and services available to external partners / cross-enterprises
Level 4: Establish
The organization implements solutions for business transformation from reactive to real-time to meet business SLAs. In this level, the business units should have become fully service oriented, all business units, and projects will govern their initiatives through SOA defined policies and standards. All business processes, applications, data are implemented as a service that is completely reusable, achieving business agility. Enterprise would use Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and / or event-driven dashboards / alerts to help the business process evaluation / response time.
Level 5: Evolve
This is the matured stage of SOA adoption. The organization is expected to provide enterprise-wide leadership for SOA governance and prove returns from SOA-supported continuous improvement . The boundaries between technology and business are practically non-existent. The business units of the organization become process centric organization where the business processes will be automated for self-correction / optimization. Top level managers and executives are able to get the metrics of the organization current status at one stop and, they can drill down through dashboards that show performance of business units individually.
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Conclusion
The best practice of getting on to SOA based projects should always be started with assessing an organization’s maturity level. To be successful in implementing SOA principles in an organization, the organization needs to understand the IT and business landscape and overall architecture of the organization across different business units based on the maturity levels. Through a phased approach an organization will able to align the business with IT by expanding their knowledge in business modeling, effective enterprise integration, applying service mediation techniques by effectively using a enterprise service bus and by adopting industry wide followed open standards to help applications to integrate easily providing a huge cost cut, as it is lightweight and extremely configurable.
For any queries, e-mail us at soacoe@hexaware.com |
