SOA: Watch your steps

You’ve seen this trick before — a headline built around an eye-catching number (“101 Windows Secrets” or “Thinner Thighs in 30 Days”) designed to lure readers into a fluffy, often disposable story. But let me assure you, this week’s cover story, “10 Steps to SOA,” is no exercise in lightweight flimflammery. This is solid stuff — a practical, stepwise approach to conceptualizing, designing, and implementing a service-oriented architecture in your organization.

A complement to InfoWorld’s SOA Executive Forum, being held in New York this week, “Ten Steps” is a collaboration between Senior Contributing Editor Oliver Rist and Executive Editor Eric Knorr. They began by interviewing enterprise architects, IT managers, consultants, and industry insiders. Eventually, patterns and methodologies emerged. “To some extent, the ordering of the steps is artificial,” admits Knorr, “since enterprises have different needs at different times.” In other words, you may need service management earlier than step 9, or choose to deploy a repository later than step 5.

But at some point, all these steps will come into play. “There are still right ways of doing things and wrong ways,” says Knorr. “If you do a lot of sloppy point-to-point stuff now, you may be adhering to some standards, but won’t be better prepared for business agility than if you’d done nothing.”

For his part, Rist is excited by SOA’s potential to transform business. “In the past, IT would say to business, ‘Here’s what the software can do; now, design your business process to match those capabilities — or wait two years until we can build you something from scratch.’ Now, business can say, ‘Here’s what we need,’ and the technology can respond,” Rist notes. “We’re not there yet, but we’re getting closer.”