Kishore Channabasavaiah

S3: A Service-Oriented Reference Architecture

For most businesses, a service-oriented architecture offers considerable flexibility in aligning IT functions and business processes and goals. An SOA decouples reusable functions, for example, and lets an organization externalize quality-of-service (QoS) variations in declarative specifications such as WS-Policy and related standards. As a flexible, extensible architectural framework, SOA reduces cost, increases revenue, and enables rapid application delivery and integration across organizations and siloed applications. Theres a challenging downside to SOA, however, in that its significantly difficult to create an SOA solution. The architect must figure out how to produce a solution using a well-defined notation or how to organize the solution as an architectural framework with interconnected architectures and transformation capabilities. There is also the question of how to design for reusability and which tools will take the guesswork out of architecture validation and capacity planning

Increasing business flexibility and SOA adoption through effective SOA governance

Most organizations understand the need to address service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance during SOA adoption. An abundance of information is available defining SOA governance: what it is and what it is not, why it is important, and why organizational change must be addressed. Increasingly business and information technology (IT) stakeholders, executive and technical, acknowledge that SOA governance is essential for realizing the benefits of SOA adoption: building more-flexible IT architectures, improving the fusion between business and IT models, and making business processes more flexible and reusable. However, what is not clear is how an organization gets started. What works and what does not work? More importantly, what is required in SOA governance for organizations to see sustained and realized benefits? This paper describes a framework, the SOA governance model, that can be used to scope and identify what is required for effective SOA governance. Based on client experiences, we describe four approaches to getting started with SOA governance, and we describe how to use these four approaches to make shared services (services used by two or more consumers), reuse, and flexibility a reality. We also discuss lessons learned in using these four approaches.