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Stage I: Distributed Software Most enterprises still have limited in-house experience with building mission-critical distributed systems, so the theme in Stage I is developing competence in using Object-oriented Analysis/Design for mission-critical applications, which is required for developing service-oriented architectures. The first step to enterprise SOA is selecting an appropriate project to begin developing OOA/D skills. It must pose a challenge, but not seem like an insurmountable challenge. It must be important enough to be meaningful but not so critical as to impose tight and inflexible timelines. The goals in Stage 1 are two: to succeed in delivering referenceable mission-critical distributed applications and to develop competence in OOA/D, iterative, incremental development and the Rational Unified Process®. Developers' capabilities grow rapidly throughout the projects, and the "anchor" project, which becomes a reference point for the organization's growing success with OOA/D. As Stage I concludes, IT's relationship with business units begins to change because they have delivered several challenging, important applications using iterative development, which mandates more frequent communication between business sponsors and development teams. Stage II: Application IntegrationThe successes of Stage I naturally progress into more complex projects that increasingly focus on integrating complex applications. In Stage II, the goal is to apply the learning of Stage I to "point to point" integration. However, Stage II is an interim step that carries a particular risk: a prolonged learning curve could result in many instances of one-off integration. Therefore, the company must progress through Stage II as quickly as possible. They must also select the right people to drive their progress: these people must be respected within IT and in business unit applications groups. The themes of Stage II are: a focus on enterprise messaging and software reuse. In Stage II, developers' application-centric focus limits the inherent reuse potential of OOA/D. Developers often start experimenting with Web services for integration in Stage II. The transformation of IT's relationship with business continues, and the business begins to assume that IT can integrate any two systems quite easily. Stage II milestones are mixed. IT and the business units have developed a collaborative relationship, but IT thought leaders begin to say, "We can't keep doing these one-offs," as they are becoming knowledgeable enough to move to the next level, where a true enterprise view of software development arrives. Stage III: Centralized Enterprise Application IntegrationStage III sees the formation of a centralized Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) function that has a formal charter, is sponsored by a senior IT executive and has at least one business unit champion. The necessity of IT and business executive sponsorship cannot be overstated because there will be a significant gap between the EAI group's formation and sustained quantifiable economic returns from the EAI initiative. In addition, the EAI effort drives extensive change, and staffing the EAI team will require reassigning top people from other groups. The EAI team's charter does not typically include non-reusable point-to-point integration. Rather, they constantly consider the business domain in order to improve the reusability of software assets. In addition, the EAI team involves the relevant "infrastructure" organization(s). The EAI team often assumes a consultative relationship with applications groups to establish standardized processes for integration. They create processes for building reusable enterprise services. They select or develop a software asset life cycle solution, which monitors services' reuse. They create a model to quantify the economic value of reuse. As Stage III closes, the EAI team has defined processes for creating, managing and maintaining reusable software as services, and they have initial models for measuring the value of reuse. Above all, they have a robust, flexible infrastructure for service-oriented software. Business unit management achieves a new level of "alignment" with IT, which is able to satisfy the needs of the business at an unprecedented level. Stage IV: Enterprise SOA Software InteroperabilityIn Stage IV, the definition of "software" changes, and "integration" loses much of its former significance because software begins to interoperate natively; it no longer requires much of a separate effort to "integrate" it with other software. Software is built by applying assets to business process within the context of enterprise and individual needs. Stages I—III have enabled the IT organization to acquire the skills and experience to succeed with a new vision for developing software. Two cornerstones of SOA are the preeminence of business services and a "service orientation." In Stage IV, developers spend most of their time on analyzing business processes, and they increasingly abstract away from technology. Business sponsors are actively engaged in developing business services. In order to fully realize the adaptive advantages of SOA, it is necessary to design business services around the business process rather than a particular application. This enables the teams to design business services that can support not only the current application but also other applications in related elements of the business process. There is a widespread change in mindset in the application groups from "What functionality do I need" to "What services do I need, and how do I present them?" The EAI team assumes an increasing role for growing and managing the repository of services and planning infrastructure enhancements to optimize enterprise software efficiency. ConclusionsSOA and Web services are an expedient means to address one of enterprise IT's back end integration problem. We believe that their appearance will be regarded as a "tipping point" for the transformation of enterprise software, as they invoke maturing technology (OOA/D) that has demonstrated success for several years. However, success with SOA requires technical skills, formal processes, management infrastructure and business analysis capabilities. This is a significant undertaking, and having clarity about the stages of progress will help organizations understand the commitment. Although we have presented a structured approach to adopting SOA, the process is far from rigid. Iterative processes offer considerable flexibility when key elements of the approach are observed. We have created this roadmap by creating a composite of the experiences of several organizations that have achieved significant economic benefits by rolling out SOA across their extended organizations. SOA can be very effective at delivering enterprise agility. Software undergoes widespread change in that code is designed as an asset that will be reused by other applications. Therefore, the more software that is deployed this way, the more assets the organization has, and well designed assets and infrastructure accelerate the organization's ability to adapt to changing business conditions. This is a powerful endgame that confers extensive competitive advantage.
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