Selecting an SOA Delivery Strategy
Recently I wrote a scientific paper with Joeri Terlouw and Slinger Jansen on “An Assessment Method for Selecting an SOA Delivery Strategy” based on Joeri’s master thesis.
The article can be downloaded from http://www.icris.nl/wp-content/whitepapers/SOAdelivery.pdf, the full master thesis from http://www.icris.nl/wp-content/whitepapers/thesis_joeri_terlouw.pdf.
Let’s have a look at the abstract.
Abstract
Organizations should carefully consider which SOA delivery strategy, for instance top-down or bottom-up, to follow in migrating toward a service-oriented environment. Selecting a suboptimal strategy can result in spending more time and money than required, or in complete failure of the SOA project. However, selecting one is not easy. Organizations are often unaware of the existence of the different strategies and their situation-dependent pros and cons. Also, it is impossible for organizations to make a well-founded choice since a method for selecting an SOA delivery strategy is lacking. This paper bridges that gap by proposing an assessment method to select a delivery strategy based on specific characteristics of an organization. The method comprises a matrix that includes the influencing factors with their corresponding value ranges, and a weight calculation to determine their impact. Another contribution of this paper is the elicitation of four different delivery strategies that have never been chartered properly.
