Like your organisation, IBM strives for high achievement and consistent, measurable results. To this end, the IBM Academy of Technology initiated a study of SOA Foundation deployments. With the objective of identifying a set of best practices based on successful outcomes, a team of IBM’s top technologists—120 IT architects, developers, IT specialists, and project managers from around the globe—reviewed more than 200 case study submissions, choosing nearly 100 case studies that were selected for evaluation. The team categorised 750 lessons learned and 650 best practices across 10 domain categories identified as the most important focus areas for a successful SOA deployment, including:

• Business process modeling, monitoring, management, dashboards
• Enterprise service bus (ESB) implementation and federation
• Information as a service
• Methods and tools
• Solutions and interoperability
• Meeting nonfunctional requirements
• Rapid delivery of pilot / proof of concept
• Development and operational environment installation, configuration
• Problem determination and resolutions, debugging, testing
• Organisational factors

Today's global business environment is characterised by fierce competition and marketplace uncertainty. Companies are finding themselves vying for consumers who are increasingly in control of what, how and where they buy. Unprecedented merger and acquisition activity and industry convergence are widening individual portfolios while decreasing opportunities for differentiation. To be sure, globalisation is shrinking the world and flattening the playing field for business.

In this globally interconnected world, business takes on vastly different proportions. Instead of just doing business in other nations, forward-thinking companies are forming collaborative partnerships with providers in those nations to market and acquire products and services that extend their business value and competitive edge. These companies are seeing beyond traditional business boundaries and are tapping into applications, infrastructures and personnel, irrespective of where they reside, to lower their costs and maximise their profit and the quality of service they provide. They are literally transforming the way they do business and altering longstanding business models in order to differentiate the business in the face of an increasing array of competitors. Such is the nature of the globally integrated enterprise.