What is the biggest challenge facing organizations in their adoption of SOA? From countless discussions with them, I conclude it is the organization itself.

Organizations can acquire the necessary SOA Infrastructure from countless vendors of relatively mature technology and products. They can be taught the processes and methods required by consultants such as ourselves. But organizational and cultural changes must come from within.

What makes an organization successful in their adoption of SOA? Clearly we can provide guidance on what we believe organizations should be doing but what are those organizations who have achieved success with SOA already doing? Why are some organizations already delivering benefits measured in millions of dollars attributed to SOA, whilst others are still finding it difficult to get started?

Analysing the various case studies around and our own experience with customers we can identify the following top ten traits of the successful SOA organization

A group of vendors have recently announced SOA Link  which they describe as an “an end-to-end SOA Governance Interoperability Initiative.”

I presented a session on SOA Governance at the recent OMG SOA, MDA and Web Services Workshop. In the presentation I highlighted the challenge of governance in the Service lifecycle when potentially so many different tools are involved in the end-to-end process. For example, the complete set of meta data that specifies the service might be dispersed to several products, across different stages of the lifecycle. 

Recently I reported on how IBM were applying SOA within the Tivoli product set itself to enable Service Oriented Management. Whilst seemingly every IT vendor now encourages the use of SOA, and provide products to support adoption by end-user organizations, there is less evidence that vendors themselves have taken SOA to heart internally.

The Systems Management domain has been the most forward thinking in this respect. For example, CA, BMC, IBM, HP, and others have developed the WSDM specification, and have or are implementing in their respective SM products. The driver for WSDM was not just interoperability between SM products and manageable resources, but enabling federated management that enables distributed resources to be managed across the Internet without requiring proprietary agents at each endpoint.

But WSDM is just one part of the distributed management jigsaw. It defines a protocol by which differnt SM products and resources can monitor status and set the resource configuration for example.

Last week, IBM announced their SOA Governance portfolio of software and professional services designed to help organizations ensure they are achieving their goals and objectives for SOA adoption.

On one hand SOA governance can be considered just part of IT governance. Ensuring that business requirements are met, delivering ROI, and meeting SLA is the same for SOA as any other IT activity. Organizations should not be worrying about putting SOA governance in place if they don’t already have effective IT governance processes.

Last week I presented at the OMG SOA, MDA and Web Services Workshop.

Recently, OMG launched a SOA SIG. The primary goals of the SIG are to

• support an MDA approach to SOA that links architectural, business and technology views of services, including Business Process Management (BPM) and Event-Driven Architecture (EDA).
• Identify and foster development of OMG modeling standards for SOA that integrate with and complement standards developed by other organizations such as W3C, Open Group and OASIS.
• To improve awareness and understanding of SOA by OMG members.
• To coordinate SOA related efforts within OMG.

Right now the SOA SIG cupboard is rather empty, but Pete Rivett  of Adaptive did give a presentation at the meeting covering some of the possible activities that this SIG might focus on.