Indeed, there are advantages to adopting the SOA approach even if you’re not at the stage at which CISR says enterprises can reap its full benefits. “If you deploy SOA-based technology before your organization is ready, you might still get a more efficient integration system in IT,” says Ron Schmelzer, a senior analyst at SOA consultancy ZapThink.

ZapThink’s Schmelzer points out that governance in this case means both the policies for specific business and IT processes and the system by which the enterprise decides how it creates and deploys its business and IT systems, such as architectural review requirements and funding priorities.

Enterprises should also understand that architecture is never done, says ZapThink analyst Schmelzer. “The idea is to continuously adjust the service–not necessarily the implementation–such as composing two finer-grained services into a more composite one or vice versa,” he says. Typically, CIOs don’t have those skills, so they should have a chief architect or architecture team reporting to them, Schmelzer advises.

Read more at: CIO Magazine