The SOA service offering at Ovations provides a business transformation consulting service to clients on a strategic level. The goal is to help them increase their business agility through implementations of SOA enterprise architecture strategies and IT infrastructure adoptions that can serve as a basis for the enablement of truly flexible, agile business operations.
Delivering a SOA to our clients is a natural progression of implementing Enterprise Architecture and the types of transformation initiatives that we focus on, including ECM and BPM.
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Our Approach
As with Enterprise Architecture, a SOA implementation can be initiated independently or as part of major new transformation project (BPM or ECM implementation). We have experience and success with both approaches.
Our approach is largely driven through the use of SOA Industry Maturity Models, which allows us to adjust the implementation to the client’s current situation as well as take into consideration the client’s strategy.
As with our other transformation initiatives, we place a strong focus on sustainability. In order to achieve this it is vital that a holistic solution be implemented that aligns People, Process and Technology. Often, not enough focus is put on the people aspects that form part of a SOA implementation. The successful implementation of SOA Processes and Governance is heavily reliant on the role that individuals and teams play in the day-to-day execution.
We align with industry standards for the implementation of SOA, including the development of a SOA Roadmap for our clients all the way through to the technical implementation of services.
Our Offerings
Areas of expertise:
- SOA awareness and change management, including communication strategies and SOA training (formal and informal).
- SOA technical implementation, through the alignment of the SOA initiative with the technical capabilities within the organisation. This may include the development of an ESB strategy and architecture, through to the actual implementation of the ESB products.
- Establishment of Service Governance processes and technical enablement through the implementation, configuration and support of service registries. This involves the development of taxonomies, service lifecycles and roles for governing services.
- Assistance in the establishment of SOA realisation processes, including the analysis and design of services. This includes the development of WSDLs for services.
- Establishment of SOA governance within the organisation. This involves analysis of the client’s IT and Business Governance functions and the establishment of governance bodies specific to SOA.
- Establishment of SOA Centres of Excellence. This involves analysis of roles and skills within the client’s IT and Business Functions, the definition of role profiles and the implementation of processes for talent management.
General Tools:
- Zapthink methodology
- Service Modelling Tools (Altova and Sparx EA)
- SOA Schools Frameworks
- SOA maturity models
- Change Management Techniques
Benefits
Implementing SOA:
- Simplification of Enterprise Application Integration
- Reduction of interface connections to back-end applications
- Consistent contract used by service consumers
- Delivery of business services across platforms
- Location independence
- Loose coupled approach
- Re-use of Integration and other IT Assets
- Visibility of business capabilities through service catalogue and proper governance will drive re-use of services
- Consistent adoption and use of design and implementation standards throughout the integration space
- Formal definition of non-functional specifications for services
- WS-I Compliance for web services
- Integration patterns
- Security implementation across services
- Optimisation of support costs
- Most effective use of support budgets through the re-use of IT assets
- Re-used existing skills
- Improved governance of Integration Assets
- Better control of use and re-use
- Better alignment of Service Level Definitions and Service Level Agreements
- Visibility of services throughout their lifecycles
- ROI on legacy applications achieved through the extension in life of these applications
- Improved version control of interfaces and enterprise capabilities
- Dynamic service search and routing
Our Work
Our team of highly qualified consultants has gained extensive experience throughout many industries. Ovations’ customers include the following “blue chip” organisations:
- ABSA
- Zurich
- Mutual & Federal
- Murray & Roberts
- Standard Bank
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is SOA?
A:
SOA is a standards-based design approach to creating an integrated IT infrastructure capable of rapidly responding to changing business needs. SOA provides the principles and guidance to transform a company’s existing array of heterogeneous, distributed, complex and inflexible IT resources into integrated, simplified and highly flexible resources that can be changed and composed to more directly support business goals.
Source: Microsoft
Q: How does the Enterprise Service Bus relate to SOA?
A:
The Enterprise Service Bus is a core element of any SOA. ESBs provide the "any to any" connectivity between services within your own company, and beyond your business to connect to your trading partners. But SOA does not stop at just implementing an ESB. Depending on what your goals are, you may want to use an ESB to connect other services within your SOA such as information services, interaction services and business process management services. Additionally, you will need to consider development services and IT service management services. The SOA reference architecture can help you lay out a SOA environment that meets your needs and priorities. The ESB is part of this reference architecture and provides the backbone of a SOA, but it should not be considered a SOA by itself.
Source: IBM
Q: What business value does SOA provide?
A:
SOA enables businesses to realize greater agility in their business practices, delivering value across both application and IT infrastructure layers. From an application perspective, SOA enables the development of a new generation of dynamic or composite applications. These applications enable end-users to access information and processes across functional boundaries, and to consume them in a number of convenient ways, including through Web, rich client, and mobile presentation layers. From an infrastructure perspective, SOA enables IT to simplify application and system integration, to recombine and re-use application functionality, and to organize development work into a unified and consistent design framework. The combined business value of the SOA approach helps to lower IT costs; provides better, more rapidly accessible business information; and enables the organization to identify and respond to workflow problems more efficiently.
Source: Microsoft
Q: How do I get started with a SOA solution?
A:
The goal of the SOA approach is to deliver a business solution that enables business agility, not to build a SOA. Re-use of services is often stated as a goal of SOA, and while it is true that re-use can be a good by-product of SOA, it is not the end goal itself. The first step in any SOA implementation, therefore, is to identify key business integration challenges or priorities. Development efforts, implemented along principles of SOA, are chosen such that they: 1) best meet the stated business needs, 2) offer the fastest time to value, and 3) best support long-term growth of the business.
Source: Microsoft
Q: What are the biggest mistakes made in implementing SOA
A:
- Viewing SOA as a global, enterprise-scale project involving the entire enterprise.
- Looking to a single vendor to offer very complete SOA solutions.
- Assuming that SOA will automatically grow out of a primordial soup of Web services.
- Assuming that business people don’t, or won’t, understand SOA.
- Assuming that IT people don’t, or won’t understand the business.
- Treating SOA as something far superior to a mere mortal “project.”
Source: Joe McKendrick