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The benefits of the service-oriented architecture are widely touted: reduced integration costs, greater asset reuse, and the ability for IT to respond more quickly to changing business and regulatory requirements. But what about the pitfalls?
SOA pioneers know all too well the challenges that can arise when a company service-enables critical applications. The SOA endeavor spans IT disciplines: It's part systems design and architecture overhaul, part application development and business makeover. Here, early adopters and other experts give their best advice about avoiding the obstacles when building this New Data Center essential, the SOA.
Read a related story on SOA expertise wanted.
1. Start with a process that previously has been opened.
Knowing what SOA project to start with could be a matter of finding a receptive audience, says Joseph Gaus, enterprise architect at Dow Corning in Midland, Mich. "Early on, target systems that people are used to having applications built around," he says. For example, SAP is the master system for many of Dow Corning's most critical business processes, including its order-to-cash process. In the past, the specialty chemical company has let other systems tap into that process - for example, a Web-based application that lets customers place orders online. "We're used to opening up that process, and the people who support that process are a little bit more comfortable having other applications built around it," Gaus says. Plus, the process is entwined with multiple applications so there's an opportunity for reuse, he says. "You can demonstrate SOA's value more easily with such a process."
2. Don't take interoperability for granted.
When Washington Group International began its SOA implementation three years ago, standards and tools weren't as mature as they are today. A key challenge was building Web services that could be consumed by both Java and Microsoft .Net clients, says Rich Colton, application integration manager at the Boise, Idaho, engineering and construction company. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards could be implemented in different ways in Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition than they could in .Net, Colton found. For example, the two environments handle the standards for a Remote Procedure Call differently, and each supports different message payloads, or content. "We discovered early on that interoperability is a nice word, but the actual implementation left something to be desired," he says. "You can't always do what the W3C standards say you can do, because not everybody has implemented all the pieces." Over the last few years, interoperability has improved a lot, but it's not automatic. Testing is critical for programmers, he says.
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Copyright 2008 Network World Inc.
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RE: 10 best practices for your enterprise SOA By Thomas on October 22, 2007, 5:19 pm Reply | Read entire comment Excellent and informative article on SOA.
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