Reading from CBDI, Lawrence Wilkes identifies the following top ten traits of the successful SOA organization:
- Have a level of cultural and organizational maturity that supports SOA goals
- Ensure there is an appropriate balance of investment in shared assets and activities that might only realize benefits in the longer term
- Organizational separation between provisioning and solution assembly
- Create a Service Portfolio that is the inventory of enterprise assets from which projects source the capabilities they require
- Continually assess where you are on the SOA Maturity curve and other appropriate process maturity models
- Put clear management direction in place for SOA
- Enjoy the luxury of already having a portfolio of modular systems, built on an inventory of shared components
- Promote sound software engineering discipline that ensures reuse, consistency and traceability and applied best practices such as component-based development (CBD)
- Focus SOA attention based on a real compelling event, such as a merger or terminal decline, that instigates strong motivation to re-engineer the portfolio
- Put a good IT governance framework in place
