Make SOA happen or SOA will happen to You

Don't panic, but think about. At Gartner Inc.'s Web Services Summit (Orlando, Fla., Dec'2006), this was a consensus among the analysts.

See the complete report here.

Let's point out some important conclusions:

1. "SOA is not something you chose to do. It will happen to you whether you chose it or not," stated Daryl Plummer, a managing vice president at Gartner;
2. Throughout the first day of the show, Gartner analysts talked up their approach to SOA governance, called SOA Portfolio. "Portfolio is a set of capabilities that you track," Plummer said. "SOA needs to be tracked."
3. According to Ivo Totev, vice president of product marketing for Software AG, "A company that focuses on SOA governance is 20% more likely to have an effectively running business."

Gartner advises to:

1. Start it's governance/management approach with the underlying technical infrastructure of SOA, like middleware and integration protocols;
2. Next in line are the procedures in use, like blueprints, templates and guidelines;
3. The final piece involves composition, which includes business processes and the humans inside a business along with the orchestration of those people and processes.
4. A central registry and repository are critical components of this dashboard. Any service is accounted for, guidelines are put into place and, therefore, the business has an organized system in play.

And finally, "No SOA suite!":

"No vendor has it all. You want SOA your way, not a vendor's way." Eliminating "suite" thinking, according to Plummer, allows for a more organic business processes that can deliver a better ROI.