SOA and the enterprise

In an article I found at Computer World, three experts talk about importance of implementing SOA on a company wide basis, not just a project to project basis, and defining the processes to have the enterprise architecture work company wide. Larry R. DeBoever, one of the principals, along with Tim Westbrock and George S. Paras, of EAdirections took time to share their views on what they see necessary for SOA to be best implemented across an enterprise.

Westbrook believes architecture is important to the processes, "A strong enterprise architecture program is vital if SOA is to reach its potential of actually operating across the enterprise rather than being isolated in individual custom application development projects."

Paras belives, "Many people see SOA as a technology, an implementation approach you use deep in the bowels of application development. It really is more of a flexible, adaptive, reusable design approach for disassembling and reassembling an enterprise as it evolves in response to a constantly changing environment."

It is important that the SOA plan of the company is built off of a game plan, as it is vital to know which services need to have processes built for them and how they’re going to be coordinated together. All of this and standards need to be the same across the company in order for SOA to work to the best of its ability.