Are you in Shape for SOA?

Blogger: Richard Watson

Are you in shape for SOA this summer?  Get ready for the SOA initiative you've always dreamed about by working out with us in the "SOA: Assessment And Planning" workshop at Catalyst North America 2008.

Chris Haddad and I will be presenting tools for allowing you to make an honest and measured assessment of your organization's SOA baseline and a recognition of areas that could be more toned.  As an example, here's a checklist we'll be walking through to assess your Incentive Systems:

People alignment with SOA principles
Mark as True [T] or False [F] 

• Services publicized
• Sharing encouraged
• Open source mindset is present (i.e., solutions delivered to other teams are documented, evangelized, and supported)
• Business stakeholders expected to define capabilities
• Teams discouraged from creating redundant software assets
• Compliance with corporate standards is expected

We will also be sending you away with box of tools you can use to plan the evolution of service-oriented thinking.   Another sneak preview, shown here, gives a checklist for Service Classification meta-data:

Service Classification Meta-data 

• Service Overview (e.g. name, description)   
• Lifecycle Attributes (e.g. version, version relationships, lifecycle status)
• Classification (e.g. basic, composite, infrastructure, business)
• Endpoint Deployment Attributes (e.g. protocols, location, WS-* specifications)
• Data Model (e.g. XML Schema, WSDL, version, semantics, validation)
• Service Level Requirements and Policies (e.g. availability, capacity, responsiveness, security, transaction rate)
• Mediation (e.g. routing, queuing, caching, transformation)
• Service Dependency Attributes (e.g. services, databases, directories, frameworks)   
• Physical Instance Dependencies (e.g. application platform, security, management)
• Business Process Model (e.g. UML diagram, business classification)
• Contract information (e.g. consumers, providers, utilization)
• Usage Guidelines (e.g. time of day, availability, # of users. throughput)
• Accounting or remuneration options (e.g. pay per use, subscription, chargeback amount)

Other tools in that goodie bag include a customizable SOA maturity model, those circuit training assessment surveys and samples for creating your own organization’s SOA roadmap.