Why Adopting SOA Is Like Purchasing a Total Gym
Making SOA work in your organization is like getting one of those workout machines advertised by Chuck Norris and Christie Brinkley. Because then you have to USE the equipment. Ty Anderson explains why you need the Total SOA Gym, and what it means for an enterprise.
3. Work Those SOA Practices (Hit the Gym): To develop quality SOA practices in your organization, you need to work on it every day. This means espousing the benefits, casting vision, sitting in on architecture meetings, reviewing code, teaching your staff, and more. To see the benefits of SOA, you need to diligently work to drive adoption. There will be plateaus, and you and your staff will want to slack off. Don't. Stick with it and you will experience the benefits over time.
4. Continue learning and sustain your momentum (Maintenance): This strategy is common sense and is not new. You don't want to lose the benefits gained from your efforts, so stay aggressive. Continue to learn new strategies (SOA and any others you find beneficial). Take the ones you think will benefit your organization and work to implement them. What you don't want to do is check the box labeled "Adopt SOA" and quit. If you do that, your organization will be back to its old flabby self in no time.
One other point in this analogy is the need for a personal trainer: someone to keep you accountable and to push you to higher and higher levels of SOA strength. On this point, I recommend two strategies:
Incorporate the SOA mind-set into your Project Management Office (PMO) and make sure it is a component of the PMO review process and code review process.
SOA offers you a way out of the redundant flab created by traditional application development. Like extra pounds on a person, applications have grown to such a proportion that too many resources are spent to maintain them and their user base. The strain on an IT organization can be enormous. With SOA (and my Total SOA Gym), you can begin to shed the application bloat and start streamlining by supporting services that can be combined to automate processes.
Ty Anderson is a partner at Cogent Company in Dallas, Texas. He spends his time consulting and building software using Microsoft technologies. In addition to consulting, Ty speaks and writes frequently about Microsoft products, including VSTO, SharePoint, Office and SQL Server, and his work has been published on Devx, DevSource, Simple-Talk.com, and CIO.com. Look for him at any tech conference, where he will be wearing his yellow Oakland Athletics hat. Say hello, and he will most likely buy you a beer.
