Big4Guy

Scoping an SOA service oriented architecture rollout project is not an easy task. SOA involves looking at a business oriented IT strategy with the main aim of ensuring that access to functionality is standardized and all existing infrastructure applications are reused. When scoping an SOA Service oriented architecture project it is important to consider both the:

- Business Impact
- Technology Impact

Business impact has a lot to do with how SOA will help business users and its advantages / disadvantages. Best practice suggests that SOA should be rolled out as a small pilot project to understand the business impact and what user groups will be affected. Once an organisation is comfortable with the results of the pilot, larger SOA projects can then be rolled out step by step to cover the entire IT landscape.

When considering the technical impact of the service oriented architecture, some important things include looking at the dependencies between the platforms, how applications and components talk to each other etc. It is also important to look at how business processes and technology are integrated and whether this will have any adverse impact on the user. The ultimate goal of SOA from a technical point of view is to ensure that data is consistent across all enterprise applications. Using automated tools are enterprise service bus can speed up this process of applications recognizing information from other sources.