Established a Center of Excellence (CoE)

Every winning case study had some form of CoE established. It may have been called something else, such as a Configuration Control Board, but all had some formal body that was responsible for governing the SOA initiative. Some of these companies already had in place an established Enterprise Architecture complete with IT governance and simply needed to make adjustments for SOA. Others did not have a formal governance plan and had to create one with enough controls in place to deliver the desired business results. The level of control and the scope of each company's governance model were unique, but every successful project sited governance as a key success factor.

Start With Well-defined Business Processes and Scale Up

In each case, candidate services were identified after well-defined business processes were established. In some cases, the business processes were already in place; in others some business processing re-engineering was required prior to creating any services. In each case, the goal was to start with some subset of business processes as opposed to trying to do it all at once. Each case study had a well-defined scope and a vision of what the future state looked like.

Define Completeness of Work within Services

A lot of thought was put into which services were critical to the key business drivers. Business services provided a complete business function.

For example, let's say a core business service identified was a shopping cart function. The goal would be to build in all of the functionality required to make the shopping cart service functional, not just a checkout service. In this example, the complete business service would also need to accept payment, communicate with shipping partners, handle discounts, etc.

Most successful SOA implementations do not have a huge number of business services. This is where a lot of SOA projects run into trouble. They try to make everything into a service, whether it provides business value or not. There is a considerable amount of overhead and costs involved with building, governing, and maintaining services. Successful SOA implementations focus on a small number of core business services that provide real business value and don't waste precious time and money on services that don't have the payback.