Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Whose SOA is the Best of them All?

provides extensive details on this on demand SOA approach as a comprehensive integration of business process transformation and the enabling technologies of services and policy-based IT management. The above are just two recent examples of the attempt to add more substance and depth to the practice of SOA. So, what are the common elements of communicating in-depth details of an SOA? There are several key ingredients: • A reference architecture that provides the details of the SOA. This reference architecture defines the key enabling technologies (services, web services, open standards, etc.), the realization of key SOA principles (composability, loose coupling, reusability, etc.), the details of key architectural layers and components (service provider/consumer architectures, enterprise service bus, component architecture, etc.), and the realization of these components through hardware, software and services. • Methods to establish a roadmap for transitioning/tranforming an organization from its current environment into the SOA reference architecture. These methods need to articulate how to deconstruct key business processes into executable services and assets that can be realized in the SOA, as well as how to move the organization from its current state to the desired state through a series of transformation steps. A key supporting asset are SOA and service integration