Hi Todd, I see nobody has provided an answer yet. I have been working on 2 SOA projects already in 2 different companies, one in Telecom, one in Healthcare. I see 2 facets to your question. - What activities should be centralized in an IT organization that is implementing a SOA? - What should be the scope of a central SOA competence center? Should it also manage Information Integration, EAI, ETL,... ?
I think SOA is just one of the possible integration means. SOA might replace some other integration techniques like data replication or EAI in some cases but won't probably replace them all soon. Moreover, existing integration teams like the EAI guys do have already a huge enterprise-wide know-how that you must certainly leverage for a SOA project. I would recommend to group SOA and existing integration competence centers. If those integration competencies are centralized and coordinated, it will be easier to select the best integration technique for each project. Just to avoid one to be in competition with another and avoid that EII is used for integrating customer data in one project and SOA in another project leading to duplicated maintenance costs. But pay attention, if you think SOA is an evolution of EAI, you will end up in the same EAI-like organization where every application team continues to do its application as usual and one integration team, now labeled SOA team, figures out how to turn these legacy interfaces into reusable services. You might see progressively benefits because the number of adapters will decrease and you will try to limit the protocols to industry standards like Soap. This is a non-intrusive approach. In this scenario, you still have a mediator that is transforming your message or your request to something else, this mediator is the SOA team that is also responsible for the implementation and maintenance of these transformations in the middle. That scenario is perfect if you do not really control the different legacy back-end applications or are afraid to modify them. It was organized this way in the Telecom company I have been working for. But I think the full potential of SOA is to have no need for transformation in the middle. The guys who are doing back-end applications should now also provide and publish their own services. The central team should manage that service portfolio, define the guidelines, manage the semantic and might do also some limited development/transformation for services/processes that involve several applications. In this second scenario, you need a strong governance, collaboration is key. It is definitely more challenging but you do not have that expensive mediation team anymore, the service consumer and the back- end application are talking together. We have selected this organization model in the Healthcare company I am working for right now. I believe an hybrid scenario between those 2 options is also possible because there are always legacy systems somewhere in the data center that are too obsolete to be service enabled. Feel free to comment, I am not an expert in SOA organization, Beth Gold-Bernstein does not remind me any book I could have readÂ… I just wanted to share my experience. Sorry for this very long post ;-) Best regards. Robin Mulkers http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/eai/applications/ --- In [email protected], "Biske, Todd" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > For the analysts and practitioners out there... How are most organizations tackling service development? I'm well aware of the Gartner Integration Competency Center approach, however, most case studies I've read all imply centralized governance, centralized technology selection, centralized infrastructure, centralized planning, but not necessarily centralized development and ownership. > > That being said, most IT development groups are used to being application providers and not service providers, so it would be a dangerous road to simply start with a completely decentralized development and ownership model. ... If we go too narrow, there may not be enough work to justify a dedicated team. What's the sweet spot in the middle that companies are actually utilizing? > > Todd Biske > Software Infrastructure Engineering > A.G. Edwards Technology Group, Inc. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Get fast access to your favorite Yahoo! Groups. Make Yahoo! your home page http://us.click.yahoo.com/dpRU5A/wUILAA/yQLSAA/NhFolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/service-orientated-architecture/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
