June 17, 2009

SOA Consortium case study contest: Let's get some best practices

It's time to starting sharing what works and what doesn't when it comes to SOA

My good friend Brenda M. Michelson, who's been on the SOA report podcast in the past, is working with the SOA Consortium around a SOA case study contest. The consortium's Web site explains:

Similar to the inaugural contest in 2008, the goal of the SOA Case Study Competition is to highlight business success stories and lessons learned to provide proof points and insights for other organizations considering or pursuing SOA adoption. To qualify for the competition, the SOA project must be complete with demonstrated business results.

[ Check out the podcast: Brenda Michelson and I talk about SOA process | Keep up on developments in SOA with InfoWorld's Technology: Architecture newsletter. ]

Why is this interesting? While we have many case studies that are provided by vendors to highlight the goodness of their technology, we have little insight around who's making money from SOA these days, though I know those projects exist. SOA is beginning to show a profit; however, those working these projects are not likely to write whitepapers and articles about them, and we're not able to benefit from their successes or, more likely, failures that lead to successes.

We've been kicking around the idea of having a single location where SOA best practices and case studies are stored, allowing those just starting down the road to SOA to get a good understanding of what works and what does not before diving in on their own problems. I'm not sure we're going to see that, for many reasons, but this case study contest should produce some interesting data points for those of you starved for best practices in SOA.

We need to start sharing. This is a good first step.

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bmichelson 18-Jun-09 5:16am
Dave, Thanks for spreading the word on our contest. Consistent themes in the "lessons learned" last year were service design and security. Here's a few quotes from the entries: Service Definition: “Develop the skillset to define services correctly. A service needs to contain a complete business unit of work. Too specific business context included, little reuse. Too fine-grained, lacking business rules, consumers won’t know how to use it accurately. Layer on specific business context using business process automation or composite service assembly.” Security: “Significant delays and challenges resulted from differing security standards among organizations. Thorough analysis of security policies and practices and careful design are required for the next phase, which will include identity management, access management and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI).” "Security, Management & Operations must be baked-in at SOA startup. Early, frequent collaboration between domain experts is essential." We'll definitely share the winning entries publicly, and pull business, technology and organizational themes from all submitted entries. Thanks again, Brenda

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