1. Analyze: Schedule working sessions with stakeholders to deliver discovery and analysis workshops that assess the readiness of applications, services, processes, and skills to embrace the SOA.

2. Identify: Identify benefits and key candidates with significant business services for reuse potential and gaps.

3. Plan: Build the outline of a workable roadmap, structure, and budget for implementation.

4. Deliver: Execute against the plan, and implement the reference architecture to realize the proposed roadmap outcomes in incremental phases.

The Three Workshops Behind the Four Phases to Pragmatic SOA

1. SOA Jumpstart Workshop is a two- to four-day program that helps customers understand and implement SOA. The workshop educates customers about SOA, explains the rationale for SOA, and identifies the business impact of moving to SOA. Additionally, the SOA Jumpstart Workshop trains business and technical teams to collaborate on the process of designing, implementing, and adopting the SOA approach to delivering business services.

2. SOA Opportunity Assessment is a three- to nine-week engagement that analyzes key business processes and identifies SOA opportunities with significant business services reuse potential. The SOA Opportunity Assessment also helps discover critical success factors, gaps, and risks. The overall goal of the assessment is to create a roadmap for the structure and approach to moving to SOA, as well as deliver a comprehensive set of tactical and strategic recommendations.

3. SOA On-ramp Implementation identifies and scopes candidate projects that have significant business services reuse potential. It analyzes the business goals achieved by the process and validates the scope, dependencies, key SOA technologies, and tools for the project. Plus, it helps businesses fill in the gaps in skills, cultures, processes, and technologies needed to transition to SOA. The ultimate goal of the SOA On-ramp Implementation is to transform significant business use cases into demonstrable proofs of concept.