SOA is an architectural style that corporate use to build and provision business services in an platform agnostic fashion. Using Service Oriented Architecture, diverse IT applications (Legacy, COTS and custom built) can be integrated using standards based platform. SOA results in loose coupling of endpoints, localizing the changes, as the IT infrastructure matures to cope up with changing business needs of an organization. This results in faster rollout cycles of IT development, adding to the agility requirements of aggressive market scenarios. A successful SOA adoption into an organization spans beyond putting technical architecture and right SOA products in place. It requires integration of SOA best practices into programme (SOA) governance and IT operational processes. From my experience in large SOA rollouts, an organization’s SOA governance strategy should include all aspects of People, Processes and Architecture to be able to truly benefit and enable reuse.

This encompasses issues related to complete service lifecycle like service identification, ownership, reuse and versioning. Quality assurance teams need to be re-aligned with the development teams. The roles and responsibilities, handoff templates, service contracts etc.  should be clearly defined between these groups. The Quality assurance teams need to be aware of added scenarios brought in by SOA. Another critical aspect, SOA infrastructure operations, also plays

an important role. It should help in ensuring that the SOA assets that have been created and consumed by multiple applications and processes are performing as per the required SLAs. The post production infrastructure should facilitate proactive monitoring of SOA assets that have been deployed and are critical to be live for the business to function. This becomes even more critical when financial transactions cut across long running processes. The ability to quickly correlate between Business and Technical exceptions and fix issues becomes a big success factor in rolling our SOA at enterprise level.