SOA MANAGEMENT

The real business benefit of a SOA comes not from the potential to reuse services and perform internal service updates without affecting others, but from actually doing these things with your SOA. In order to do this, you need to gather objective information about the performance and availability of your actual services to identify bottlenecks, select targets for improvement, and judge the business effects of changes to underlying services.

Service Management is critical to getting a clear return on your SOA investment. To encourage reuse, you must document dependencies both of and between services and store such dependency metadata along with the Service Level metadata discussed earlier into a commonly accessible and searchable repository and define procedures to update the data.

SOA Management Review deliverables:

• Document detailing existing management environment including current alerting and notification procedures, environment visibility and operations procedures, performance analysis and reporting procedures.
• Document detailing recommended alert conditions for problem management.
• Document detailing recommended dashboard configurations for each critical job role.
• Document detailing recommended historical data collection for reporting and performance management
• If you have existing business process documentation, a document detailing touch points for transaction management. If you have no such documentation, consider a QAT Process Modeling engagement.
• Knowledge transfer on SOA Management principles to architects, project managers, and operations staff.

SOA Management prerequisites:

• An existing Service Oriented Architecture with well-defined services. If you are not comfortable with the clarity of your existing definitions, a QAT Service Enablement engagement can help you.
• If you wish to perform transaction level management, you should have process models (may be diagrams or formal technical models such as BPEL). If you have no such documentation, consider a QAT Process Modeling engagement.
• Appropriate architects, business process owners, and operations staff should be available to the consultant for discussion.  

Duration: Highly variable according to project scope.

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