ESB Lessons Learned

Organizations adopting enterprise service bus (ESB) technology often encounter challenges with legacy technology, the need for new skills, organizational acceptance, and new service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance processes. Enterprise architects in firms that have successfully adopted ESB technology have learned how to avoid or minimize these pitfalls by observing a number of best practices. The most important practice has been to implement incrementally instead of attempting a big-bang approach. Other practices recommended by these architects concern linking to SOA vision and business strategy or the technical architecture approach. But all share one important quality: planning and forethought that strikes the right balance between short-term and long-term objectives.