Veterans of SOA projects impart lessons learned Moving past concept into real-world deployments, SOA initiatives are starting to bear fruit, and with that harvest come valuable lessons for IT professionals. At InfoWorld’s SOA Executive Forum in New York last week, attendees heard practical advice from enterprises on the leading edge of the nascent technology.SOA requires enterprise architecture and a vision for your company’s business processes, said Andy Brown, chief technology architect at Merrill Lynch.“You have to have enterprise architecture and goals about how you want processes to function — where you want to be in a year’s time. It comes down to business aspirations, operating principles, and rolling that into a [strategy], of which SOA will be a part,” Brown said. Benjamin Moreland, assistant director in the office of technology at The Hartford Financial Services Group, said that putting strong governance around the processes within an SOA deployment is a critical step.Ed Vazquez, group manager of Web service integrations and SOA implementations at Sprint Nextel, strongly advises those planning an SOA to get specific about requirements, such as reporting tools, from both the business and technology sides of an enterprise.“You need to have measurement [capabilities] in place to gauge the success of your project,” Vazquez said. Software Development