Todd Biske: Outside the Box

“SOA is about breaking the silos in a company… A successful SOA requires that departments and teams collaborate with each other not bilaterally but well in a federation of service providers and consumers. Small central teams will have to be created to manage that growing spaghetti of interactions at the federation level. Companies that don’t create these central teams will fail in getting any return from their SOA.”

The above quote is from Robin Mulkers. I couldn’t agree with it more. One of the key challenges in adopting SOA across an enterprise is determining what the right organizational approach is. Clearly, the old way of developing applications will not work in the SOA future. These applications must be decomposed into business services, each of which must be developed and maintained independently of the other services. This means that the “traditional” project will involve more development groups, and the releases of each of these groups must be coordinated to not create a project management nightmare. This is a huge challenge for the enterprise, and must be done as a planned transition rather than as a big bang. Start with a few dedicated service development teams, and slowly transform the development organization from an application development organization and into a service development organization.

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