SOA Success from Concept to Completion

By Scott Rose
Executive Director, Accenture Innovation Center for Sun Solutions, Accenture

While many organizations have been following the development of service-oriented architectures over the past few years, most have taken a cautious approach to implementation. Recent Accenture research into high-performance IT organizations clearly shows, however, that the top performers are more aggressively implementing an SOA approach than the rest of the pack.

Roughly 80 percent are implementing SOA, and of these organizations, a robust 38 percent of their application portfolios are comprised of composite applications built using SOA. Organizations are now integrating applications across their enterprise silos and are building interfaces to connect with strategic suppliers and customers.

But as organizations move forward with SOA, some key questions often raised are: How do we achieve the most business value from SOA? What is the best approach for implementation? Where should we get started? Based on broad experience with more than 500 clients implementing SOA in 2007 alone — and through our work with Sun in implementing Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS) — Accenture offers several recommendations for the best way to move forward on an SOA journey.

Where to Start: Understanding the Challenge of Change
SOA initiatives can be truly transformational for an organization — and it's important to understand that this is both a benefit and a challenge. The benefit is in the potential of SOAs to enable organizations to improve productivity, respond to opportunities more quickly, and streamline supply chains.

The challenge is in being prepared for the broad impact on your IT and business organizations. One way to minimize the impact of change is by taking a small first step. SOA initiatives don't have to start from scratch; the journey can begin by simply creating interfaces between existing enterprise applications.

What to Do: Key First Steps
Once the decision has been made to pursue an SOA initiative, it's easy to succumb to the pressure to get something up and running as soon as possible — and give short shrift to proper preparation on the front end. That can threaten the success of any project. To obtain the most business benefits from an SOA approach, organizations should:

1. Plan early and often. It helps to think of SOA implementations as journeys that require careful planning — not just IT planning, but planning that includes every part of the enterprise that will be affected. Accenture uses a four-phased planning model to help clients develop a roadmap for an SOA implementation that avoids common pitfalls and challenges.
   
   
2. Develop an ROI-driven approach. Set short-term and long-term goals. It's important for you to have not only the longer-term vision of how to reap the benefits of improved business processes, but also get the shorter-term return on investment that will justify the overall project.
   
   
3. Implement governance. One of the most common mistakes made in the haste to roll out an SOA initiative is trying to deal with governance and security after the basic architecture is in place. Governance and security are critical components of any SOA implementation that need to be incorporated from the beginning, not after the fact.

Recognizing the need to keep SOA initiatives on the fast track once they're under way, Accenture developed a variety of solutions, jumpstart programs, and project accelerators based on Sun's Java CAPS product to help speed and simplify implementation.

How to Succeed: Lessons from the Real World
A large manufacturing company recently engaged Accenture to help select a vendor and recommend an enterprise integration platform that would be the right match for the company's integration needs now — as well as lay a solid foundation for future SOA capabilities. A technical assessment led Accenture to recommend Sun Java CAPS, and the two organizations teamed on a highly successful implementation.

Using the Accenture SOA Jumpstart Solution for Sun Java CAPS, Accenture and Sun met the company's need to:

• Shift applications from a legacy mainframe environment
• Reduce IT maintenance costs
• Make enterprise applications more responsive to business demands

The implementation included core architecture services, integration interfaces, and a governance approach. As a result, the company now has the architecture in place to build quick and cost-effective interfaces among resources, to easily access mission-critical information and applications, and to reap the full benefits of SOA over time.

You'll find more detailed information about how Accenture and Sun are teaming up on SOAs at www.sun.com/accenture/