An efficient way for creating an Enterprise Service Portfolio

Deciding to evolve the IT developments of a large company to a Service Oriented Architecture is a long term project, that requires a serious preliminary organisation. More particularly, in order to optimise the possible outcome of the SOA, it is vitally important in this context to plan for the elaboration of a Services Portfolio. What is the content of such a portfolio and what are the successive steps to incrementally set it up? In the following paragraphs we try to shortly answer these questions, mainly building on the conclusions of various service oriented developments, that can now be considered as being mature.

Normally an Enterprise Service Portfolio is related to multiple projects, either new developments, business process improvements, rejuvenation of existing applications (possibly COBOL legacy conversions) or the integration of various systems. So a first difficulty, that generally arises, is the problem of the “sponsoring” of the service portfolio creation. A well designed portfolio will obviously yield an interesting “return on investment”, but certainly not during the project that first establishes the portfolio. For this reason evolving to an SOA architecture, implying a precise definition of the available services, is a high level decision that must be supported by the general management with middle and long term objectives. Once the Service Oriented Architecture choice has been made and approved, it is important to consider the Enterprise Service Portfolio creation as an incremental approach and not as a “big bang”.

Hereafter we are going to describe a certain number of activities, that are both vital for establishing a service portfolio and compatible with an iterative development scheme.

1. Obtain a management decision for an SOA type approach that will concern the whole company in the long-term, define the business goals and priorities from the strategic, commercial and information technology point of view.
2. Identify the domains of the enterprise, that are using a consistent set of specific and related business processes and that may probably benefit from an SOA approach.
3. Define a global policy for a Service Oriented Architecture; this strategy should in particular clearly identify various aspects at the tactical and commercial levels and define the architecture and standards that will be used; describing the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements in terms of security, performance, throughput and reliability is also an important point.
4. Decide the scope of the first (or next) increment of the portfolio development; normally this increment will concern one particular domain of the enterprise.
5. Identify the services, the applications and the dependencies for the incremental development, that is under consideration.
6. Prepare a detailed description of the service specifications.
7. Precisely define the applications that are being developed.
8. Establish the technical architecture for the deployment of the service based applications, in particular the installation of the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).
9. Publish the service portfolio after integrating all the information that has been derived from the current incremental process.

After a close examination of this scheme, that we have tried to keep simple, it is obvious that the various steps that must be undertaken in order to establish a valid enterprise portfolio is not a trivial task. So it is really vital to gain a maximum profit from the practical experience of the few organisms that already have achieved a high maturity level in their approach to a Service Oriented Architecture.