Business agility

Like your organization, 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 categorized 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
• Organizational factors

Addressing business, technology, systems reliability and cultural fundamentals can help organizations better capitalize on today's opportunities.

You must address technology fundamentals such as unlocking the wealth of function buried in siloed mainframe-based systems so that you can reuse that information across the organization. You must address reliability fundamentals such as ensuring that an always-on connectivity infrastructure is in place to support the mission-critical systems that would paralyze the business if they failed. And you must address cultural fundamentals such as recognizing the recurring gap between charting the right course for the business and actually bringing the business to that desired destination.

The established, proven resources to lay this fundamental groundwork are here today and have shown their value innumerable times. For example, when manufacturers assemble a car, they do not plug each individual electrical system into all the other electrical systems; rather, they connect each system to an electrical "bus" that enables any-to-any connectivity among the systems. The same concept holds for connectivity among IT systems. Using an Enterprise Service Bus(ESB) is the most flexible, cost-effective and — most importantly — reliable way to design IT connectivity.