An early SOA Strategy presentation delivered to multiple clients across Financial Services sector (UK, Europe)

1. Developing a SOA Strategy
Salim Sheikh
Solutions Director
Blue-Crow
December 2006

2. Agenda
• What and Why SOA?
• Successful Strategies
• Case Study

3. Common IT Challenges
• Increasing competiveness and rapid change require business agility
– Lag time between business needs and IT delivery limits continuous
business optimization
– Siloed stakeholders and subject matter experts result in long planning and
design cycles
• IT environments growing more heterogeneous and decentralized
– Rigid architectures require substantial developer effort
– Widespread interdependencies create downstream impacts from changes
– Inability to enforce policies system-wide
• Processes and data are difficult to monitor or improve
– Disconnected activities provide little actionable business intelligence
– Poor data quality within and between applications hinders productivity
• Constant pressure to lower cost of ownership
– Maintenance costs of point-to-point integrations and technologies
– Resource-intensive manual processes

4. “ The main objective with SOA initiatives is to enable a more
agile, flexible and standardized approach to designing,
developing and deploying functionality that is often
scattered throughout established IT systems.
”
— Gartner, Inc., "Benefits and Challenges of SOA in Business
Terms", September 2005

5. What is Service Oriented Architecture?
A service is a coarsely defined business function, often playing a role in
one or more larger business processes, composed of a set of smaller
processes or tasks.
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a course of action to align
processes, information, and technology with business imperatives by
using services as an organizing principle.
SOA is not:
– Web Services
– A middleware product
– An IT-only initiative

6. Benefits of SOA
• SOA speeds business change.
In its core design strategy of packaging applications into business units of work, service
orientation reflects and models business processes. As the business changes, developers
can more easily map business process changes to applications and then implement
the appropriate IT changes.
• SOA facilitates business connections.
With your business processes packaged as modular, accessible business services, you
can connect them where and when they are needed to optimize processes across
customers, partners, suppliers, and your own internal applications
• SOA enhances business control.
Because services model business processes, the flow of data and transactions through
service-oriented applications is valuable business data. SOA infrastructure actively
manages service flows and can provide flexible and dynamic access to this data, which you
can use to analyze and optimize business results and process costs.
• -- Forrester, “Your Strategic SOA Platform Vision,” March 2005

7. Guiding Principles of SOA
• Incremental improvement
• Cost-benefit analysis
• Driving to commonality and reuse
• Focus on areas of high volatility
• Focus on most essential services

8. Business Value / TCO Trade-Off
Ideal
Business Value Delivered by IT
Custom Apps
Services
Composite Apps
Differentiated
capability built on
common platforms
Packaged Apps
(lower TCO)
Lower TCO,
but loss in
differentiated
capability
Reduction in TCO

9. Executive Value of SOA
CEO Challenges
• Economic value
• Sustainable growth opportunities
• Cost structure & performance management
Differentiation on the outside
CIO Challenges
Simplification on the inside • Reduce systems complexity
• Improve service reliability
Execution mastery
COO Challenges
• Process excellence and consistency
• Improve service culture
• Exploit synergies and economies of scale

10. Different perspectives
Business Strategy
Business
Business Strategy
Bring new products and services to market
Improve operational efficiency Strategists
Increase business value
Execute
Business Activity Monitoring Business
End-to-end process performance monitoring Analysts
Real-time insight and control of business
Business Process Management Process
Quick delivery of new services Designers
Quick automation of business processes
existing IT
Leverage
Services Layer Systems
Standardization of services Architects
Reducing code-based integrations
Systems Integration Software
Technology interoperability; Architecture and Engineers
Infrastructure Services Standardization

11. Architecture & Strategy

12. Making It Happen
Identify
Driver Govern
(Process/ SOA Journey
Integration)
Define SOA
Roadmap
Strategy
Assess
Enterprise Execute
Architecture SOA Roadmap
Readiness

13. Enterprise Repository

14. Ten Challenges for the CIO
1. Platform
Competency
2. Architectural
Standards and
Interoperability Identify
Driver Govern
3. Infrastructure (Process/ SOA Journey
Integration)
4. Data Architecture Define SOA
Roadmap
5. Security Strategy
Assess
6. Training Enterprise Execute
Architecture SOA Roadmap
7. Application Readiness
Rationalization
8. Methods and Tools
9. Testing
10. IT Organization and
Enterprise
Architecture

15. Adoption of SOA is an Incremental Journey
Phase 4
Phase 3
Phase 2
Phase 1
Enterprise
Service
Bus Based
Organize and Tactical Solution and SOA Is
Strategize Implementations SOA Platform Industrialized
0-18 months 18–30 months 30–48 months

17. SOA Planning Process
• Establish a Business and IT Joint Vision
– Assemble steering committee
– Conduct collaborative requirements gathering
– Mutually commit to goals
• Define the SOA Roadmap
– Top-Down Analysis: Identify key business pain points
– Bottom-Up Analysis: Review current technology infrastructure
– Prioritize high value-add processes and identify quick wins
– Organize modest releases to maximize incremental value
• Launch Detailed Analysis
– Evaluate enterprise SOA skillset within IT
– Define service-enablement architecture
– Model high-level services and data structures

18. Case Study: Services Architecture Vision
External Sales Rich User Salesforce
B2B Mobile
Interface Portal Interface .com
Business Processes Process Process Rules
(BPM)
Services
(SOA)
Synchronization
Monitoring
Data
Security
Quality and Enrichment
Access
Layer Connectivity and Authorization
Metadata
Enterprise
Custom Data Operational salesforce.com
Data
Sources Datastore
Warehouse

19. Delivery Framework

20. Summary
• SOA is not a technology, but a process for aligning business
objectives, technology assets, and IT activities in a way that
maximizes incremental improvement, flexibility, and reuse.
• Initiating SOA requires understanding the business value of
services and combining top-down and bottom-up methods of
analysis.
• SOA solutions favor technologies emphasizing process focus,
agility, loose coupling, and interoperability.
• AppExchange eases SOA integration through a standards-based
web services API, effortless meta-customization, and
sophisticated presentation layer compositing.