Designing an effective SOA, services inventory strategy
This excerpt from "SOA: Principles of Service Design" defines service inventory blueprints and the ultimate goal of the SOA transition effort.
An ultimate goal of an SOA transition effort is to produce a collection of standardized services that comprise an SOA service inventory. The inventory can be structured into layers according to the service models used, but it is the application of the service-orientation paradigm to all services that positions them as valuable IT assets in full alignment with the strategic goals associated with the SOA project.
However, before any SOA services are actually built, it is desirable to establish a conceptual blueprint of all the planned services for a given inventory. This perspective is documented in the service inventory blueprint. There are several common business and data models that, if they exist within an organization, can provide valuable input for this specification. Examples include business entity models, logical data models, canonical data and message models, ontologies, and other information architecture models.
A SOA service inventory blueprint is also known as a service enterprise model or a service inventory model.
Use the following table of contents to navigate to chapter excerpts.
SOA: Principles of Service Design
Home: Service-oriented computing and SOA: Introduction
1: Design fundamentals: Design characteristics
2: Design fundamentals: Design principles
3: Design fundamentals: Design pattern and design pattern language
4: Design fundamentals: Design standard
5: Design fundamentals: Best practices
6: Introduction to service-oriented computing
7: Service oriented architecture
8: Service compositions
9: Understanding service oriented computing elements
10: Entity services
11: Web services and service oriented computing
12: Service inventory blueprints
13: Service-oriented analysis and service modeling
14: Service-oriented design
15: Goals and benefits of service-oriented computing
16: Increased intrinsic interoperability
17: Increased federation
18: Increased vendor diversification options
19: Increased business and technology domain alignment
20: Increased ROI
21: Increased organizational agility
22: Reduced IT burden
ABOUT THE BOOK: |
SOA: Principles of Service Design is dedicated to service engineering and establishing service-orientation as a design paradigm. This hands-on manual for service design establishes concrete links between specific service-orientation design principles and the strategic goals and benefits associated with SOA. Purchase the book from Amazon.com. |
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
Thomas Erl is the world's top-selling SOA author, Series Editor of the "Prentice Hall Service-Oriented Computing Series and editor of The SOA Magazine. His books have become international bestsellers and have been formally endorsed by senior members of major software organizations such as IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. He is the founder of SOA Systems Inc., a company specializing in SOA training, certification and strategic consulting services with a vendor-agnostic focus. |