It’s a question we’re asked a lot: How do I get started with SOA?

There is uniform agreement that SOA holds great promise as a strategy for improving business agility, better aligning IT and the business, and increasing overall IT efficiency. And developing an SOA strategy has become a key issue for most large enterprises: CTOs in a 2007 McKinsey survey ranked SOA as their top strategic item.

Yet despite this, organizations struggle with how to start the transformation to SOA, especially in assessing their business readiness. For every organization that successfully adopts SOA and can testify to its benefits, there are others whose SOA initiatives have failed to deliver sustained business value, or have stalled. What does it really take to be successful with SOA? What are the technical, organizational and business challenges? What do successful SOA adopters do differently?

SOA Assessment and Domains
In the summer of 2007 we teamed with IDC to research how well-prepared organizations are for SOA and assess the critical areas that would help drive overall success. Based on the analysis of many different SOA implementations from a variety of industries, HP identified eight primary domains that together provide a framework for measuring SOA maturity and readiness. These domains are:

• The Business Domain: Ensuring business and IT commitment and involvement in SOA.
• The People Domain: Ensuring that the right mix of skilled staff understand and are committed to SOA. Fundamentally, SOA requires a change in the way IT people work together and the way they work with the business.
• The Program Management Domain: SOA requires an iterative approach, with each step providing a complete business solution. The key is ensuring this is program management that involves the right organizational span across relevant teams, departments, business units, and partners.
• The Governance Domain: This concerns the models, systems, and processes that manage services across the lifecycle. Typically SOA governance is much more important in an SOA that in a traditional IT environment.
• The Architecture Domain: The “A” in SOA is a reminder that enterprise architecture, solutions architecture, information architecture, and technology architecture are all critical.
• The Enabling Technologies Domain: Of all the SOA domains, enabling technologies has gotten the greatest attention and so is probably best described. This area covers the tools and technologies needed to support the goals and processes of enterprise SOA.
• The Operations and Management Domain: This covers all aspects of SOA operations and management, and the application of the processes and policies defined in the governance domain.
• The Supply and Demand Domain: As SOA implementations grow and mature, they open up a variety of new opportunities for sourcing. By having resources and assets described as modular services, it becomes possible to be more dynamic and granular in how these services are realized.