Executing on SOA strategy

Sitting in a packed house watch Eben Hewitt discuss Executing a SOA Strategy and sharing his experiences with rolling out SOA at Choice Hotels. Good services need to have several attributes:

- Strong interface
- interoperability
- reusable & composable
- standard contract
- independent lifecycle
- discoverable and governable - not necessary from the beginning but needed quickly after first services are rolled out.

Criteria for a pilot project:

- Meaningful business value but don't bet the farm
- non-mission critical
- flexible delivery data
- don't cross organizational boundries
- make sure you have a good executive sponsor

A nice shout out from Eben for the help with the SOA Maturity model.

Don't confuse and merge SOA governance and SOA Compentency Center.  They have different but complementary roles in an organization.

SOA compentancy Center
- Act as a focal point for training and knowledge transfer
- Early adopters of new technology so they can set direction of where and how to use various tool sets
- Act as a deep bench to development teams when additional SOA bandwidth is necessary

Using SOA tools does not mean you are doing SOA. All of your SOA concepts should be tool independent.  Make sure you don't buy tools and then recreate the current state diagram using the new tools.  Look at how the current state diagram can be improved by SOA independent of the tool.