100 SOA Questions Asked and Answered

100 SOA Questions brings together authoritative answers to the most crucial questions business, technical, and architectural decision-makers ask about SOA. It draws on the immense experience of two SOA experts who’ve participated in more than 100 SOA projects in the roles of architect, designer, consultant, technical manager, and strategist.

 

Organized to reflect the Open Group’s Open Services Integration Maturity Model (OSIMM), this book provides fast, convenient access to information about all facets of SOA planning, implementation, management, and utilization.

 

This book will be an invaluable resource for all executives, architects, and practitioners who have just started their SOA journey or are well underway.

 

In-depth answers to questions about SOA topics such as

• SOA Concepts and Planning

• Business Strategy

• Organization and Support

• Governance

• Methods and Techniques

• Applications

• Architecture

• Information Management

• Infrastructure

• The Future of SOA

 

100 SOA Questions answers the most critical questions executives and practitioners have about SOA. Kerrie Holley and Dr. Ali Arsanjani draw on their unsurpassed experience from hundreds of SOA projects conducted worldwide.

 

• Why should business stakeholders care about SOA?

• What is the return on investment (ROI) of SOA adoption?

• What is flexibility and how does SOA deliver on this promise?

• Should service development be centralized in service centers?

• How should services be identified or specified to maximize reuse?

• How do SOA methods reduce the lifetime costs for applications?

• How can organizational barriers to SOA success be removed?

• What changes with application development when SOA is introduced?

• How does architecture change as a result of SOA adoption?

• What is a canonical message model?

• How does the SOA infrastructure support events?

• What are context-aware services?

 

Praise for 100 SOA Questions 

“In this book, Kerrie and Ali truly capture the essence of SOA and its benefits to your Business and IT Deployments. Businesses today are desperate to be more nimble and innovative while reducing costs–a tricky proposition. SOA enables companies to reach these goals by tightly aligning the business and IT around the business processes, breaking those processes into reusable business and IT services, and allowing the underlying business and IT infrastructure to be more nimble in supporting the business goals. Effective SOA deployments also lay the groundwork for Cloud formations that can deliver even greater flexibility and cost saving to the business. This book clearly shows that a visit to the land of SOA and Cloud should be on every CxO’s bucket list for their own business.”

Daniel A. Powers, VP Amazon Web Services Sales

 

“100 SOA Questions is a must-read for business and IT users who are interested in improving business innovation and agility. Based on their real-world experiences from hundreds of global customer engagements, Kerrie Holley and Ali Arsanjani do an outstanding job of explaining the multiple facets of SOA and providing a prescriptive approach to help readers incrementally unlock value from rigid business processes and antiquated application silos.”

Manoj Saxena, IBM Executive and Tech Entrepreneur

 

“In order for IT systems to be successful in today’s world, they must be correct, complete, and extensible. For a long time we have had systems that are point-intime complete, partially correct, and minimally extensible. Kerrie and Ali get to the heart of the matter when they speak to us about the DNA of a Service-Oriented Architecture. It has been my experience in working with them that their focus in defining granularity, composability, and loose coupling from the viewpoint and with the help of the business stakeholders is much more than the cliché, ‘aligning IT with the business,’ would lead you to believe.”

Manny Bonet, Software Architect

 

“It is the underpinning infrastructure of a system that determines ultimate flexibility and the ability to scale change to keep pace with rapidly changing global markets. Through Kerrie and Ali’s simple, clear, and comprehensive articulation of the Service-Oriented Architecture approach, I can see that systems must pass through the maturing that SOA brings in order to leverage design methodologies of the future. Those who don’t will be destined to revisit SOA. Great work, gentlemen, in showing us, in such a real world way, the differentiator needed to fight the fight in an ever-leveling technology playing field.”

Robert Mansell, Vice President, Payments & Settlement Systems, PayPal

 

“This book, written by prominent IT architects Kerrie Holley and Ali Arsanjani, shows a deep and clear understanding of the SOA paradigm for real business starting from the ground up. It will add a strong contribution both for technical and business people in terms of mutual understanding of SOA implementation to solve real life problems of today’s enterprise. This book should be ‘A must’ to have it at each IT architect’s desk.”

Alexei Chirokikh, Ph.D., CIO, Gazprombank (OJSC)

 

“In 100 SOA Questions, Kerrie Holley and Ali Arsanjani have presented an up-to-date, vendor-independent explanation of Service-Oriented Architecture suitable for IT executives, as well as the broader audience of business stakeholders and architects. Sufficiently detailed while not being overly technical, 100 SOA Questions is a book I can heartily recommend to participants in the Licensed ZapThink Architect course.”

Jason Bloomberg, Managing Partner, ZapThink LLC

 

“Having known the authors for the better part of the past decade, I can think of no better stewards for all that is pure and good with SOA. Through absolute dedication to their craft, Holley and Arsanjani have been at the forefront of SOA IP, crafting best practices, tools, methodology, and thought leadership in ways both theoretical and practical. This book does the impossible by giving you a glimpse of the magnitude of sheer brain power focused on an incredibly relevant and important topic to both Business and IT. Use it wisely.”

Michael Liebow, Board Member, former CEO and Tech Entrepreneur

 

Kerrie Holley has a wealth of experience in application development, software engineering, systems engineering, IT consulting, and enterprise architecture. Mr. Holley has operated as Chief Architect, Strategist, Consultant, and Designer on more than fifty SOA projects. In his current role, he oversees hundreds of SOA projects in their technical direction, strategy, and successful deployment. Mr. Holley’s current focus is on the convergence of business rules, business process management, analytics, and SOA in making businesses more agile. Mr. Holley holds several SOA patents and has a BA in mathematics from DePaul University and a Juris Doctorate degree from DePaul School of Law. Mr. Holley has worked in a senior capacity for several companies, including Bank of America, Tandem Computers, Ernst & Young and is currently an IBM Fellow.

 

Dr. Arsanjani is a rare mix of industry hands-on consulting and academic research that he leverages in his Chief Technology Officer role as advisor to high-profile companies. Through his experience as strategist, consultant, and architect, he has helped companies achieve business performance through leveraging and changing IT. His current area of focus is to enable companies to achieve higher levels of business performance and enable them to optimize their business through the agility gained in concert with IT and business operations. Ali Arsanjani has chaired standard bodies such as The Open Group and is responsible for co-leading the SOA Reference Architecture, SOA Maturity Model, and Cloud Computing Architecture standards. In his role as Chief Architect, he and his team specialize in harvesting and developing best-practices for the modeling, analysis, design, and implementation of SOA and Web Services on hundreds of projects.

 

He is a hands-on, sought-after architect around the world on large SOA projects, and he is the principal author of the industry first Service-Oriented Modeling and Architecture (SOMA) method for SOA. His work on variation-oriented analysis allows companies to build less software but achieve higher gains, and his patterns for service- oriented software architecture combine SOA with business process management, business rules, and analytics to achieve higher levels of maturity for organizations.