Summary

In this chapter, we looked at costs and benefits of SOA for different stakeholders and different strategies. In strategic SOA, the perspective of the business case is from the entire enterprise or company. If the SOA initiative is IT-driven, the business case is defined in terms of IT goals, costs, and benefits. A tactical or departmental SOA is evaluated in terms of costs and benefits for a department.

The roadmap that you create also depends heavily on the type of initiative: strategic, IT driven, or departmental. Apart from objective criteria such as cost and benefit, time to complete the project, and ability to repeat the process, perception is an important factor that determines the ability of an organization to mature.

In the next chapter, you will learn about governance of an SOA: life cycle of services, tooling you can use, and versioning of services.