SOA for Profit, A Manager's Guide to Success with Service Oriented Architecture

`SOA for Profit: A manager's guide to success with Service Oriented Architecture' is the result of a joint effort by IBM en Sogeti, both leading ICT companies and both comitted to SOA. A first bonus is the book's publication under the Creative Commons Share Alike 3.0 Unported license: its content may be copied and adapted freely, provided the adapted material is published under the same license and references the original. But there is more to win you over. Scanning the Table of contents shows that indeed the relevant SOA-issues are addressed, starting with the `why' of SOA; next the `what'; the `when', the prerequisites for SOA - your business characteristics, organisation and available human resources; the `how' which is divided into three stages of a SOA life-cycle; and finally the pittfalls. This is concluded with a comprehensive model and survey-tool to self-assess your organisation's SOA maturity level. This however requires you to study 256 pages of text, case-boxes, tables, figures, checklists, etc., including the introduction and appendices. Therefore the `manager' in the book's subtitle will probably come from the ranks of CIOs, ICT managers, systems architects, and business consultants with an ICT leaning, but not so much from those of CEOs. The book's overriding message is that SOA should start and end with your business, with technology in a supportive - and not leading - role. Those looking for elaborations on XML, SOAP, WSDL and other such abbreviations therefore will be disappointed: these are not covered by the authors. This by no means implies a `soft' approach to SOA as often found with advocates of the `service oriented approach'. The `hype-level' of the book is low, and the conditions required to indeed realise `SOA for profit' are clearly spelled out: without firm ICT governance SOA will only cost you money; those looking for simpe solutions to complex problems should go elsewhere; SOA is not a `one time activity' but requires long-term committment; if you are not operating in a dynamic, highly competitive environment with a strong ICT-dependency, it may be hard to come up with a convincing business case for SOA ........ To treat SOA mainly as an ICT supplier-issue therefore is considered a viable option for those organisations that do not meet these requirements, as long as this is a conscious decision. But whether actively implemented by the user organisation or through the new generation of products from their ICT suppliers, the authors leave no doubt about the fact that SOA is here to stay. The least convincing part of the book - surprisingly - covers the attempted integration of IBM's Component Business Modeling approach and Sogeti's Dynamic Enterprise Architecture (DYA) method. This however is more than compensated for by the many practical tips and tools provided in the book. To name a few: the SOA maturity assessment tool mentioned earlier; how to define your most viable SOA projects through a limited number of