Scoping Strategic SOA Projects

While many large enterprises have already made the move toward enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA), other firms are just starting down this path now. And in many cases, no one in the organization really understands the full scope of an enterprise SOA project, so those firms look externally for help. As a result, sourcing teams — in their role of finding appropriate providers — often find themselves actually creating the project scope as well. Sourcing teams in this situation should take a top-down, strategic view of SOA across the enterprise; start with developing a future state environment; map key business processes, business services, IT solutions, and IT assets; and then define a governance and infrastructure strategy. By undertaking these five steps, sourcing teams will be well prepared to find an appropriate service provider to help implement enterprise SOA.