Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture (ESOA) Adoption Reference

Abstract

Summary form only given. In response to pursue of achieving business agility and technology flexibility through SOA, this paper provides insight and discussion regarding to what SOA is, what it really means to an enterprise, where it is right now, where it is leading to, how to practice it, the expected benefits, and how to calculate associated ROI. It includes discussion in SOA concepts, technologies, and best practices based on practice experience, survey from public sources, as well as initial ideas and contributions. SOA enables agile businesses through composable business processes and services that are supported by flexible and composable IT services. The commonly accepted standards ensure interoperability, shareability, and reusability. SOA can be applied to the full spectrum of enterprise business and IT, which include business service specification, IT strategic planning, enterprise architecture, solution development, and business operation. Also, SOA can be considered as a practical modeling approach for enterprise architecture (EA) development. It can help to bridge EA with solution architecture and implementation by layered service descriptions across business modeling, application modeling, and technology implementation; so that it can help bring EA into reality. The ROI for SOA should consider the full spectrum of SOA benefits. A ROI reference matrix can be constructed based on the value proposition and IT strategic planning, which can provide guidance for iterative ROI assessment and performance measurement. The concept of SOA is not new, which can be traced back to the common object request broker architecture (CORBA). The popular component-based and service-oriented architecture has extended its scope to business domain, which is reflected in federal enterprise architecture (FEA). Web services enable the SOA concept being applied in Web environment. The content in this paper includes SOA conceptual model, federated SOA service infrastructure, enterprise SOA layers, SOA service life cycle, etc. The recommended SOA adoption steps are discussed in three stages: SOA initiation, SOA workgroup formation, and SOA practice. SOA initiation includes SOA planning, and establish baseline for cross organizational SOA adoptions. The SOA workgroup usually is an extension of existing EA team, and serves as the core for SOA practice. The SOA practice includes the development and documentation of strategic plan, governance, and approaches; the extension of enterprise architecture; the coordination of cross organizational SOA implementation; service institutionalization; service extension for enterprise external services; etc. This paper discusses SOA in widely covered topics and popular concerns. It consists of the combination of SOA current state studies and solution recommendations in moving forward, which can be served as a foundation reference in SOA adoption for an enterprise