Harry has been asking me when I am going to start blogging again - thanks for pushing me Harry.

He talks about my big SOA, little SOA post from a long time back - it seems that the nomenclature has taken on a life of its own now - I saw Joe McKendrick refer to this recently as well.

Yeah - how do you eat an elephant again? one bit at a time - yes, we are on the same page.

We have been through this before - http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2006/oct06/10-04SOA.mspx

1.

Make sure that you have sound business drivers. Oftentimes we see customers struggle to justify their SOA projects – it is almost always because they are trying to "do SOA" as opposed to addressing a business need.

 

2.

Top-down, big-bang mega approaches do not work in the real-world. Bottom-up approaches are not manageable. But there is an approach that we see successful customers adopt – what we call the middle-out approach. These customers all have something in common--they start with clear business challenges and focus on creating business value

 

3.

Try to avoid subscribing to what I call "the build it and they will come" approach. They spend 18 months to 30 months building a services infrastructure, and eventually, when they reach the service consumption layer or what is called the user-experience layer, they find that the business has moved on. That what they have built is something that made sense for the business at a point in time in the past, but by the time their solution was ready for prime-time, their business needs had changed and their investments were all for none. We recommend customers partition their use cases into small sets and build out the entire use case end-to-end, from the data through to the consumption. You don’t learn by planning – you learn by doing. Partitioning your functionality helps you track changing business needs much more effectively.

 

4.

Demonstrate value in rapid iterations. Time-to-value is a critical metric, a healthy metric. The trust-me approach is not a healthy model for customers that want to be successful leveraging SOA.

 

5.

Last, but not the least, successful customers use what we call a "snowball" approach. How do you build a big snowball? You start with a small snowball. This is probably the most important take away with respect to leveraging SOA to drive business value.