Succeeding with SOA: Realizing Business Value Through Total Architecture

by Paul C. Brown

"Like so many acronyms in public currency, SOA means many different things to different people. Paul Brown deftly avoids getting caught in the trap of overstating the case for SOA. Instead, he brings the topic skillfully into focus, zeroing in on the concepts that must be understood in order to be effective. Paul's purpose, as I've found so often in his presentations and conversations, is to get to the core of real-world architectural issues that make the difference between success and failure. Paul doesn't sit in an ivory tower pontificating; he gets right down to the critical issues in order to develop effective real-life strategies." --From the Foreword by Jonathan Mack, Senior Technical Architect, Guardian Life Insurance Company "As Paul Brown explains in this fine book, there is more to software development than just writing code. Successful software requires deep thought and strategy. It requires the coordination and marshalling of the resources and intellect of the entire company, both business and IT. I learned much from reading his manuscript and heartily endorse the finished book." --Dr. Michael Blaha, author and industrial consultant "Paul Brown has provided a practical and actionable guide that will illuminate the way for Business and IT Leaders involved in IT strategy, planning, architecture, and project management. A successful adoption of SOA will touch every aspect of the business and change the way IT does business. This book does a good job of describing the organizational challenges and risks and providing suggestions to manage them. It also dives deeply into the architectural techniques that can be employed in order to align the service architecture with the business, thus providing maximum benefit and continued funding for your SOA transformation." --Maja Tibbling, Lead Enterprise Architect, Con-way Enterprise Services " Succeeding with SOA achieves where most books on service-oriented architectures fail. It accurately describes what practitioners are seeing, as well as why, and gives them practical examples through case studies and instruction. Most useful both for those about to take the plunge and those who are already soaking." --Charly Paelinck, Vice President, Development and Architecture, Harrah's Entertainment "This book is a must-read for architects and SOA practitioners. It provides an important foundation for a SOA strategy. Brown emphasizes the importance of aligning services with their business processes, building capabilities using strong enterprise architecture standards, and ensuring an effective governance process. The book promotes the notion of mutual dependency between managing a business using business processes and managing its IT with SOA. By aligning the two paradigms, a business can become more agile, able to adapt to change both quickly and economically. This is the promise of SOA." --Sunny Tara, Director, IT, Enterprise Architecture and Services, Harrah's Entertainment Getting a Desired Business Return on Your Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Investment Today, business processes and information systems are so tightly intertwined that they must be designed together, as parts of a total architecture, to realize enterprise goals. In Succeeding with SOA , Paul Brown shows how service-oriented architectures (SOAs) provide the best structure for such clean, well-defined interfaces between collaborating entities. But even SOAs need to be correctly understood and implemented to avoid common failures. Drawing on decades of exp

278 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2007

Reviews

[Steve Whiting · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you are a high-level manager or executive who has heard about SOA and wonders what it means, whether it can be of use to you in your company and what challenges it brings, this book will give you an easily digestible introduction to the subject, albeit one which has a substantial pitch for elevating Enterprise Architecture.

If you're looking for a book which gives you practical information on designing and implementing SOA, this is not that book, as it contains an awful lot of information on project set-up, risk management and organisational structure, and not very much at all on SOA.

With the number of references to the companion book, and looking at the large print size and the amount of content which wasn't specific to an SOA environment, I can't help but feel that one book's worth of material has been stretched out over two books.