AgilePath's SOA Quad Model™

An Integrated Model of SOA Entry Points and Implementation Patterns

Executive Summary

An interesting quandary facing many organizations actively planning and implementing service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiatives is how to integrate and reconcile various "entry points" to SOA. During the initial planning and execution stages of SOA, many organizations have a predilection toward a particular SOA pattern or style. This tendency directly influences the services identified and implemented to realize that SOA pattern. Examples of these SOA patterns are process-centric, data-centric, legacy-centric, and consumer-centric. These SOA tendencies are real and reflect natural organizational biases that exist based on the current business challenges and imperatives, the initial problem domain targeted by an SOA initiative, the skills and experiences of the initial core SOA team, or the corporate culture of the organization itself.

AgilePath Corporation has developed a model to reconcile and integrate these various SOA tendencies. The SOA Quad Model™ establishes an integrated and holistic SOA framework that unites the fundamental SOA entry points around an SOA Reference Architecture and Services Reference Model so that there are no contradictions between the various SOA patterns. The SOA Quad Model is an extremely useful tool for planning, prioritizing and modeling SOA initiatives with business stakeholders, as well as for incorporating various SOA perspectives into a single SOA model.

AgilePath's SOA Quad Model: Four Fundamental SOA Entry Points

AgilePath's SOA Quad Model™ was conceived to address a fundamental disconnect in the SOA industry. As SOA initiatives gear up, one of the challenges an organization will face is how to identify appropriate SOA opportunities across the enterprise, and then how to identify candidate services that will be implemented to address the business challenges targeted by the SOA initiative.

Two SOA patterns tend to be pursued initially to address the incipient planning and implementation of SOA in an organization: process-centric SOA pattern and data-centric SOA pattern. The process-centric SOA pattern approaches enterprise problems from a value chain, process modeling and process decomposition perspective. SOA opportunities are focused on business process transformation and business process reengineering, often driven by Six Sigma or Lean Six Sigma initiatives. "It's all about the process," is the mantra of a process-centric business professional. Data-centric SOA patterns, on the other hand, have a bias toward modeling core entities and enterprise data. This SOA pattern centers on data-centric business challenges such as data accuracy, data latency, business intelligence, and real-time analytics, and thus approaches its SOA initiative from this perspective. Many data-centric SOA initiatives adopt the mantra of "It's all about the data," and from their perspective this is true.

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