Key issues for implementing SOA

The primary issue that needs to be considered when implementing a SOA is that the entire organization is on board. If some parts of your organization are implementing an SOA and others have not bought into it, you will end up with similar issues as exist when an SOA is not implemented at all. Educating the entire organization in relation to why a SOA is being implemented and the benefits it can bring is the first key issue.

The second key issue comes down to the technology choices that will be made. There are many technologies available that tell you that they ‘do’ SOA, however, many still tie you into proprietary interfaces and technologies. Implementing a standards based SOA by choosing technologies that use standards like SOAP, REST, UDDI etc. can provide additional benefits:

• You are free to choose best of breed technologies that support the standards that you will use for each different service.


• You could potentially use different technologies that implement the same standards. While this may sound strange, one product may offer advantages in terms of cost or levels of support for different services that are implemented.


• In many cases, these technologies will be licensed based on how much you use them. This means that their cost is an operational cost as against more traditional models which require investment of significant capital up front.

Finally starting with a small effort can help you to develop implementation processes for your organization in a practical way thus helping you to improve your planning and delivering what your users want on time and within budget. The SOA Gateway provides the perfect tool to investigate how implementing a SOA may help in your organization.

Small or medium size Organizations and SOA

The first question one has to ask here is do you not see your organization being a medium or large organization in the future? If so this becomes rhetorically a question about where your organization will be in 5 years time.

SOA is more a business concept than a technical concept. One would have to assume that organizations are continually striving to improve their ‘services’ and the delivery of those services. The services your organizations provide are improved by:

• Speeding up delivery of the service.


• Removing red tape.


• Ensuring a consistent result when the service is used each time.


• Ensuring that when things go wrong (as they will), that you deal properly with the failure to the satisfaction of your customer.

From an IT perspective, exactly the same process applies. You should be looking at the parts of your services that are repetitive and thus take time. Identifying  where it make sense to use IT (for manual, repetitive tasks) and where it doesn’t (where a human being is absolutely needed) is the first step to mapping many of your existing manual procedures involved in a providing a service to lower level services that can be implementing efficiently and consistently using a SOA IT Infrastructure.

From that perspective, SOA is for every level of organization; while there is a perception out there that SOA tools and technology is too cost prohibitive for small organizations, this is not the case. There are many tools and services around for implementing SOA which charge based on usage which is cost effective for even the smallest organizations.

Is SOA for every business ?

Consider many large and successful businesses today and the amounts they spend on their IT. Each of these companies started out as small and medium sized enterprises and are spending literally millions each year trying to undo the IT short cuts they may have taken in the past.

Large companies now see the value of a SOA and what it can bring them in terms of costs savings and business agility and so are attempting to convert or move their systems to such an architecture.

So the question really is whether your organization intends to grow and become larger ? If it does, as I would expect all would aspire to, why not get your IT right now ? Implementing a SOA as early as possible provides the foundations to enable your business to scale from an IT perspective in the same way that you expect it will scale in terms of what the business does.

Not implementing a SOA now will mean you incur costs and delays into the future when your business begins to get bigger; and the tactical, stop gap decisions you may be tempted to take with your IT now will come back to haunt you in the future. The SOA Gateway is a tool that can help you to implement a SOA in any size or scale of business.