SOA Nine Rule of Thumb

Rule of Thumb 1: SOA Benefits
There are many business and technical benefits to an SOA, but none is as important as the capability for a company to respond quickly and effectively to business change and to leverage that change to gain a competitive advantage.

Rule of Thumb 2: IT and Business as Peers
You cannot build a successful SOA model if you cannot forge peer working relationships between the IT and business groups.

Rule of Thumb 3: Incremental Business Services
In an agile business, incremental business services that mirror business process steps become the core deliverables of the IT group.

Rule of Thumb 4: Business-Smart IT Architects
Business-aware IT architects are the bridge between the company's IT and business units.

Rule of Thumb 5: Opportunities for Services
Within a business process, each interaction with an IT asset is a potential location for a service.

Rule of Thumb 6: Measuring Services
A service that mirrors and executes a business process can be used to allocate IT costs and provide IT justification by correlating the IT costs with business process results.

Rule of Thumb 7: Service-Oriented Means in the Core
Companies committed to SOA will find business processes and services at the center of both business design and IT delivery.

Rule of Thumb 8: Proving Business Value of SOA
A company's SOA gives IT a definitive way to prove business value through business results measurements.

Rule of Thumb 9: Competitive Business Agility
When a change in business process no longer requires a change to application programming logic (that is, when you have a successful SOA), your company has attained competitive business agility.

Source: Service-Oriented Architecture Compass: Business Value, Planning, and Enterprise Roadmap By Norbert Bieberstein