With the fervor of SOA activity, you need to know how to derive the most value and how an incremental approach addresses planning, development, and deployment challenges.

Enterprises of all sizes are increasingly recognizing the importance of implementing service-oriented architecture (SOA) in order to accelerate software reuse and provide real-time responsiveness to customers. The ability to overcome obstacles, including managing several independent IT systems and expanding product lines and business applications spread throughout the enterprise, makes it easy to understand the popularity of SOA deployments.

For instance, in an effort to reduce costs and improve efficiency, many companies have started outsourcing business processes offshore to countries like China and India. These offshore workers are taking the place of individuals who know how to traverse through complicated legacy transactions. The carriers sending work offshore are looking for a solution that can be sent to the business process outsourcing (BPO) provider to get them up and running as quickly as possible.

SOA is a key enabler in propelling business process integration (BPI) initiatives within an organization.

We have been talking seriously about SOA for two or three years now. But is SOA a good solution for the short term? Isn't it a time bomb for the future?

A bank in France started to set services in place in 2002. At that time, they had about 15 services related to their CRM system. Progressively, following their approach of creating services, by 2005 they had several hundred services used by all the development teams. This is a good story for evaluating an SOA initiative. Digging into the different project teams, talking with project managers and developers, it appears that there were so many services—too many, as a matter of fact—that it was impossible to use and manage them in an efficient manner! Re-use of services and versioning became a nightmare. As a result, the whole system had to be reconsidered.

In today's complex IT world, choosing the right change management system is crucial.

As your business needs evolve, a greater volume of software changes—possibly over several platforms and certainly under a tight schedule—are required to support your business objectives. Structured software change management, and the productivity tools it brings to the table, becomes a requirement not only for the IT staff, but for other departments within your company as well.