It is very important that the purpose of SOA projects should be the implementation of specific business needs. – emphasized Gábor Darmai    , the Technology Director of Alerant Inc. Such a requirement can be when we must implement complex, integrated administrative processes, for instance in case of a merger of companies or divisions, but an equally nice SOA tasks can be the creation of integrated user platforms that simplifies the users’ work. Today the multi-channel access to business processes is already a requirement, which the SOA architecture fully satisfies.

The secret of SOA
The implementation of a well-operating service oriented infrastructure is primarily not a technological, but an organizational issue. Its most important factor is the committed management that has the task to elaborate and above all to consistently implement an organization-wide SOA strategy. – Actually the cutover to service oriented practice is not an easy task because it reshapes the major part of an enterprise’s internal operation and apart from the technological changes, it also requires changes to the organizational operational processes. – the Technology Director said. The purpose is that the operational processes effectively support the enterprise’s services during their entire life cycle, furthermore the two types of SOA projects, the implementation of business solutions and the service development projects.
The first type of projects create end-to-end solutions based on business services available in a SOA infrastructure. The tool kit (BPM, Service Registry) deployed during the course of implementation of these types of projects gives priority to business processes and supports the notion of reusability. Within the framework of service oriented projects the services required for the business solutions are created and they mainly focus on solving technological problems (availability, scalability, security). One of the first steps of launching SOA projects is to create the organizational operation processes and to find the appropriate professionals, who, apart from their deep technological knowledge are also able to efficiently communicate with the business area. Alerant believes that the success of implementation mostly depends on the excellent expert team, and only to a lesser degree on the product deployed. Therefore when a product is selected, not only the technological content of the tool, but the expertise background providing the related services should be closely reviewed.

Project implementation roles
The organizational structure that maps the service life cycle is divided into five well-separable roles. The organizers’ team is responsible for keeping contact with the business area and for the functional business requirements analysis. The service area relies on the registration database for organizing, supervising and managing the processes related to SOA development and life cycle. The architects are in charge of making sure that the business processes and applications are implemented in the appropriate architecture and in accord with the appropriate method. The team’s task is to develop the technical standards (requirement analysis, planning, development and testing) to be adhered to, and to establish the framework systems. The third team creates comprehensive business solutions on the basis of services offered by the IT infrastructure, while the fourth team develops the basic business services equally covering technological and business requirements. Finally, the fifth team is represented by the vendors, who provide IT services to the enterprise. – The operators of the infrastructure that is being developed are also faced with new challenges. – Gábor Darmai     pointed out. - They have to work with integrated business processes, for which they have to use new type of tools. For instance the application-operation that ensures the availability of business services and processes, uses the WebService container component of Enterprise Service Bus for monitoring and measuring, while the infrastructure-operation is responsible for the smooth operation of the supporting environment (for instance operation system. databases, application servers). Two basic infrastructure components are needed for the implementation of SOA. The tool that supports business processes caters for the planning, simulation and running of human-and integration focused workflows, whereas the service management tool kit includes the Web Service container that is responsible for the service registration database, the Web Service development as well as the runtime monitoring and SLA measuring of services. The most important task of service management tool kit is to ensure re-usability and that business processes can be monitored.

Smooth implementation
Since in case of a large enterprise SOA implementation equally brings changes into the enterprise’s organizational operation, business processes, applied IT technology and development methodology, the one-step, comprehensive implementation can hardly be an option. – However, it is also advisable to avoid the excessive fragmentation of the project because then the greatest advantages, namely the integrated services that can be accessed on a uniform platform, cannot be created due to the lack of comprehensive design. – Alerant’s Technology Director said. – It is practical to prepare a so-called SOA roadmap as the first step of implementation, which sets out for several years ahead the milestones of development of applications and integrated business processes of the SOA model. It is important that we make the users accept the transition period, during which only a small portion of the business processes operate according to the SOA model.

In this phase SOA is "only a new application with a new user interface" for the user, which he must handle in addition to the currently deployed applications. His patience will be rewarded with the benefits that will become apparent in the more efficient work performance and operation, which will be available as service oriented architecture becomes full-fledged.