Designing an effective SOA, services inventory strategy

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.

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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