SOA first steps

I just got back from New York where I spoke (twice) at the SOA Executive Forum.  I moderated a panel on SOA Governance that was packed. This always surprises me since governance is one of those topics that can really make people yawn, but people seem genuinely concerned about how to manage SOA. The panel included Ed Vazquez of Sprint-Nextel, Jeff Schneider of MomentumSI, Johannes Viegener of Software AG, and Michael Hill of HP.  This was a great panel--we had a lot of good interaction, some humor, and good audience participation. 

At one point I asked the panel "If you were called on to consult with a company just starting out with SOA, what would be the first things you'd tell them to do?" Here's some of the answers I got:

• Hire an evangelist who will live, eat, and breath SOA and get everyone excited.
• Build a SOA team and include a Portfolio Manager for SOA.
• Get the processes down first.
• Build a service inventory.
• Set objectives for outcome based projects.
• Think about architecture first.
• Create a based in a vertical and then expand out to the rest of the organization.
• SORE (Strategize - what products?, Operationalize - how to manage at scale, Rationalize - what services?, and Evangelize)

Someone suggested that "modernize" ought to be added to the list. But one point made by the panel is that you have to strike a balance between just adding SOAP APIs to all your legacy applications and starting over. Successful SOA applications modernize in some places and just leave well enough alone in others.

I also gave a presentation on digital identity. I covered what digital identity is, why it's a necessary foundation for SOA, went over some some digital ID concepts, and discussed my ideas for identity management architectures. All of this is covered in detail in my book on digital identity.