Oracle SOA Governance 11g Implementation: Successfully implement SOA governance using Oracle SOA Governance Suite 11g with the help of practical examples and real-world use cases with this book and ebook

Weir & Bell Telecom is a manufacturer and retailer of mobile phones and devices that has experienced rapid growth, following a number of highly successful marketing campaigns, and aggressive growth on the high street and internet. It has a very strong line up of products that are considered niche products and that result in high profit margins.

With competitors poised to release similar products, the company realizes that, in order to achieve its business objectives and thus maintain its leadership position, it needs to vastly improve and exploit its IT processes and infrastructure. Having grown rapidly, the IT department has not developed in line with the business strategy and the board has recently appointed a new Chief Information Officer (CIO) to oversee the IT department, and to develop an IT strategy that is closely aligned with the business strategy. The aim is to allow the organization to increase the efficiency and responsiveness of its supply chain processes...

The new CIO immediately commissioned a review of the existing SOA infrastructure and an assessment of the maturity of service delivery. The assessment was executed in three primary phases as depicted in the following diagram:

In order to gather all the information in a structured way and to subsequently quantify the results in a meaningful fashion, the Oracle Maturity Model was employed. The model was used to quantify each capability domain using a tool created by the company (similar to the tool distributed along with the book). This allowed the CIO to obtain an accurate view of the "As-Is" situation and to develop and quantify a realistic "To-Be" model.

The CIO set aside a period of three weeks (one week per phase) for the execution of the assessment, the elaboration of recommendations and the resulting SOA Roadmap. As the timeframe was very aggressive, it was agreed that the organization should commission the consultancy services of a niche player with a background in SOA...

The results of the SOA Maturity Assessment mentioned in the previous section were as shown in the following diagram:

The consultancy conducting the maturity assessment identified a number of key challenges as follows:

The CIO responded to the results of the SOA Maturity Assessment by creating an enterprise architect team whose responsibility was to ensure that business needs were clearly reflected in all future IT development efforts, and that the underlying infrastructure was able to scale to meet business demands. The team was also responsible for rationalizing existing systems and services and for reducing or removing redundancy.

One of the first actions for the architecture team was to create a reference architecture that specified a blueprint for all IT systems within Weir & Bell Telecom. The reference architecture supported IT agility by putting SOA at the heart of system development. This would allow the IT department to keep pace with the demands of the business moving forward and facilitate the introduction of new sales channels as identified in the business strategy for growth.

The enterprise architecture team also set out clear objectives for SOA Governance. Moreover, it was...

The enterprise architecture team, under the guidance of the new CIO, created a compelling business case that was presented in the board of directors at Weir & Bell Telecom. The outcome of this presentation was pivotal to transforming the image of the IT department, which was perceived as being inefficient and slow to react to business changes, and also to secure any needed funding.

SOA was at the heart of the business case. The CIO recognized SOA to be the primary vehicle for introducing the agility required to meet the aggressive demands placed on the IT function by the retail arm of Weir & Bell Telecom. The maturity assessment was an essential part of the business case and it gave the CIO a real understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of his department and allowed him to focus on areas that needed to be addressed immediately. The alignment of IT strategy to business strategy was fundamental to realizing maximum return on investment (ROI) in terms of services...

Based on the feedback from the board of directors, the new CIO of Weir & Bell Telecom placed the monitoring and measurement of critical success factors and business metrics at the heart of the architectural effort. By aligning the IT strategy with the business strategy and being able to report back to the board on the return on investment for IT-related projects, he would be able to demonstrate the effectiveness of IT across the enterprise. The key here was to prove that the use of SOA would result in significant cost savings while also increasing development productivity and reducing software maintenance costs. The resulting performance improvements were expected to have a significant impact on business agility and enable the organization to respond quickly to competitive challenges.

The critical success factors for the architectural effort were heavily reliant on the fact that development and support costs would be reduced by enforcing governance, most notably...

The enterprise architecture team began by creating a new reference architecture that would be strongly aligned to the business strategy. This is presented in the following diagram:

The IT strategy was developed with the target operating model in mind including the requirement for new sales channels. The underlying infrastructure was ported to a private cloud-based model to allow for the rapid growth predicted by the business and also in light of expected acquisitions that were due to be made over the coming years. SOA was endorsed as the preferred architectural style for software development with existing and new commercially available and off-the-shelf (COTS) products having little or no customizations moving forward.

Proposed IT developments were assessed and aligned to the IT strategy with a number of projects scrapped and new initiatives introduced.

In this chapter we described a case study based on a real live SOA Governance implementation as experienced by the authors. The chapter illustrated how the governance concepts described in Chapter 1, SOA Governance such as maturity assessments, reference architectures, SOA assets, and design-time and runtime Governance, were put into practice in order to successfully implement SOA Governance into an organization.

This chapter emphasized the importance of having the right level of sponsorship and buy-in from the business before embarking on a governance implementation. This was achieved up front, since without business sponsorship the benefits that SOA can bring to the table would have not been visible or achievable. Additionally, the chapter described how by presenting a business case with clear business benefits and objectives it was possible to qualitatively and quantitatively measure success. This in turn allowed the board of directors to understand the positive impact that IT...