Daniel ShollerHaving spent 4 days talking to dozens of our clients about SOA, it is impressive how far we seem to have come in such a short time. While there are certainly any number of "how do we get started" questions, many of the people I am speaking with are well on their way to implementing SOA system components.
Nearly all of the questions revolved around the fundamental issue of how to determine what services should be created and what they should look like. This issue, which is often discussed under the heading of "SOA Governance", "SOA development methods" or "the role of the COE", shows that (at least for the folks that came to Symposium) we have moved beyond the idea stage and are focused on practical application of SOA.
When you think about the answers, this all comes back to the fundamental notion of shared services. Shared services are agreements; the users of a shared service agree that they are doing the same thing, and that it would be beneficial to do it in the same way. The implementation of that service can then be consolidated into a single shared service entity (whether an organization, or a module of an IT system) and the participants in the agreement will use that implementation. This is how business-level shared services (such as consolidated purchasing) work, and it is also how shared application services (in the SOA sense of the term) should work.
The process of service governance is to make sure that these agreements can be created, formalized, implemented and modified. There are many techniques and technologies that may help with these efforts, especially as the numbers of services (and therefore the number and diversity of parties to the agreements) grows, but first and foremost it is important to insure that agreement can be reached.
The problem of which services to start creating is essentially the same. Organizations must begin with the services over which there is already some agreement about their similarity, or at least the need for similarity. This may account for why many of the SOA projects that we see are essentially hand-crafted MDM. Master data is master data precisely because it is shared, and there is a recognition that the more similar the master data is across systems, the better the systems will be.
All of this backs up the information from our surveys, which has shown that service governance is the most difficult aspect of leveraging SOA. If your organization is trying to move to SOA, you need to be sure to focus on the the fundamentals of service governance, and agree to agree.
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