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Reviewer: Cecilia G. Manrique

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is the focus of this book, written by a team of experts from IBM with years of combined experience in the field. Their goal is to share with businesses a way to model and structure their organizations and operations that will help them make the most of coordinating their efforts to maximize the use of information technology (IT) for greater profitability and to reduce their complexity, in order to operate more efficiently. In effect, they hope to provide corporations with a greater ability to monitor, react, and adapt to the various new opportunities and changes that surround them. The book makes use of SOA and champions it as a company's greatest source of flexibility. Using the concept of SOA as the proper method of governing and managing an organization, the lessons in the book are designed to increase the return on investment and decrease risks?two very important goals of any organization. Different from management, governance connotes a process or a set of processes that are put in place to ensure that the appropriate laws, policies, standards, and procedures are being adhered to. Two common areas of governance are the political and the enterprise or corporate realms. One aspect of governance is compliance; this is achieved by higher degrees of communication, comprehension, and buy-in by those who have a stake in the organization. It is the purported primary goal of SOA to bind business with the world of IT in a way that makes both the company and the IT sector more efficient; therefore, it is about SOA creating a bridge that facilitates the relationship between the two. SOA is an architecture paradigm that enables IT to organize, define, and implement projects in such a way that their value can be directly correlated with the business goals, vision, and drivers of the enterprise. With the use of flowcharts, tables, graphs, and various other visual aids, the authors provide perspectives of the many components necessary for standardizing the mechanisms of exposing business-critical information. The hope is that this will enable an enterprise to drive down costs and operating expenses, eliminate duplicate systems by consolidating their operations, and improve the time needed to market any new or enhanced capabilities. The authors suggest that organizations should adopt SOA only when they have reached the maturity to do so. This requires the enterprise to first assess its organizational, cultural, technological, infrastructural, and personnel capabilities. Organizations must understand where they stand in terms of the maturity indicator metrics, in order to develop a plan that helps them move up the SOA maturity ladder. IBM, as one of the leaders in championing SOA, has developed the Capability Assessment Tool (CAT) that enables its customers to perform a self-assessment of their maturity as it pertains to SOA adoption. The authors suggest that an SOA Center of Excellence (CoE) be set up at the enterprise level, following IBM's model. The SOA CoE should be adequately represented by both business and IT members of the enterprise. Crucial to any operation is the ability to measure. The old adage, "You cannot manage what you cannot measure," applies to SOA governance as well. It seems to be the promise of SOA to align IT initiatives directly with business visions and goals, to foster reusability, and to drive down total cost of ownership (TCO). SOA governance is the framework that tries to make use of measurement as one of the key responsibilities of any enterprise. The book provides readers with some SOA governance case studies; the case study approach is prominent in the exposition. The authors also point to the documentation on the book's Web site, as an additional source of information for those who want more tips for planning their implementation. However, one wonders about the applicability of procedures geared toward the operations of a giant corporation such as IBM. How much of what they convey in their CoE can be used by other operations__?__ More case studies of successful implementations outside of the IBM family are necessary before we can pronounce the verdict that SOA governance indeed works for all types of businesses. Until then, this remains a theoretical enterprise. Online Computing Reviews Service