Collaborative Consulting

The "E" in SOA

By Peter Salvitti and David Decker

Today, one cannot pick up an IT industry or trade publication without seeing a story or a product advertisement extolling the virtues of a “service oriented architecture,” or SOA. The concept has experienced rapid growth in recent years, and is accepted by many IT professionals as the approach for creating an agile enterprise. SOA is the culmination, to date, of the evolution of software architecture concepts that focus on the decoupling of enterprise capabilities and creation of an “ecosystem” geared to highly-interoperable and reusable software components. Then, these interoperable, reusable components are used through formal (i.e., standardized) contracts or definitions.

Enterprise Architecture, however, is a discipline that has been around for many years. It is principally concerned with applying well-known frameworks to describe an organization’s “as-is” (or current-state) and its “tobe” (or future-state) architectures. Despite its long-term reliability, in many cases, EA is no longer held in high regard by fast-moving, dynamic organizations. Instead, many companies consider EA as a holdover discipline from the days when architecture groups were ensconced in the organizational “ivory tower” and held sway over IT organizations with burdensome design methods and procedures.

On the other hand, SOAs have quickly become the “darling” of the media. Where EA is often viewed as plodding, and too analysis-heavy, SOAs offer a tangible deliverable: services. However, facilitating transformation of an enterprise requires careful IT planning and architecture—hallmarks of EA. In this paper, rather than simply embracing SOA at the expense of EA, authors David Decker and Peter Salvitti, directors in Collaborative Consulting’s Technology Services Practice, discuss key elements, architectural patterns, controls and practices that enable effective, optimal adoption of SOA concepts and technologies.