Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

1.17. IDENTIFY AND BUILD THE "RIGHT" SERVICES

Without services, you cannot have an SOA. Furthermore, an SOA comprised of services with no business or organizational value is well nigh worthless. Therefore, getting your services right is essential. What are the right services? The right services support business and mission objectives. The right services are derived from your SOA strategy and align with your future direction. The right services support your SOA goals. The right services offer a balance between immediate value and long term investment. The right services should be reusable and shared to ensure rapid return on investment, short payback periods and cost avoidances.

The right services can be quickly identified by examining the SOA opportunities that are documented in your SOA strategy. By performing a process decomposition operation on each of the opportunities in your SOA Opportunity Roadmap, you can quickly identify processes, applications, and candidate services that meet the criteria for being the right services. Of course, to really ensure these are the right services, you must perform service modeling and design activities on the candidate services to achieve appropriate functional scope, encapsulated functionality, granularity, and reusability as well as assessing risk and business fit. Getting the right services is a function of focusing on the right SOA opportunities using an SOA Opportunity Roadmap that supports your SOA strategy.

SOA GOVERNANCE IMPLICATIONS ...