By Richard Reba More and more organizations are harnessing service-oriented architecture (SOA) as a way to cut through the complexity of their operating environments. Although SOA has tremendous potential, implementing and using it effectively can be a tremendous challenge. To help organizations with their SOA journey, CSC has developed a framework that identifies five key SOA features and provides proven methods for overcoming barriers to their implementation.

1. An easy way to begin the journey is with service orientation, focusing management and decision making on services. Organizations can immediately boost the value that their services provide by building a mutual understanding — a service agreement — with their customers about the key aspects of the services that matter most.

The barrier to service orientation is silo orientation, where the focus is on systems rather than services. Practical education and outreach using jargon-free language is a proven way to overcome silo orientation.

2. To reduce time and money, use modular services as building blocks to assemble more complex services such as applications and business processes. Modular services save time because they head off “starting from scratch,” save money because they are cheaper commodities, and reduce risk because they are often already proven. Modular services also enhance business agility, since an assembly of modular parts is easier to change than a fully custom solution. Use service catalogs to be sure that modules match the services that are needed.

3. Organizations can do more for their customers and stakeholders by employing SOA standards and enabling tools to provide a rich, scalable, and secure platform of enabling services across silos and distances. This platform will allow you to get more out of legacy silos, serve more customers, and harness a vastly wider array of capabilities than ever before.

Introducing SOA standards and tools does mean additional labor and capital costs. A proven way to substantiate those costs in the near term is to identify early adopters for each standard and tool. Early adopters are customers with a clear need, willing executive sponsors, and participating providers with a clear business case.

4. Use shared services to consolidate providers of similar services and to create a division of labor, ensuring services are provided by the most effective providers. The key barrier here is cultural. Sharing services across silos means a loss of control for customers, and requires a high degree of trust on their part.

Balanced governance is a proven way to overcome these cultural barriers. “Bottom up” governance fosters collaboration among silos and “top down” governance improves transparency to find redundancies.

5. Finally, use service roadmaps to evolve services and introduce SOA features over time. Service roadmaps can adapt and optimize operations from simple enhancements and/or automation to full re-engineering and/or transformation.

Enterprises face barriers in making “in flight” changes while executing service roadmaps. Especially with transformational changes, enterprises often can’t bear the required cost and risk while simultaneously operating the business. An agile services lifecycle can overcome these barriers by prioritizing changes and making them in incremental, frequently recurring evolutions.

SOA can help organizations overcome complexity, accelerate progress, and work and spend smarter. The key to effective implementation is understanding that SOA involves much more than advanced technology.

Richard A. Reba is SOA practice director for CSC’s Federal Consulting Services.