Doing SOA right is not only hard, but it can be a bit like a movie director pitching an idea to a Hollywood studio: once you’ve sold them the idea, the real work begins. (But that, of course, is completely ignoring all the hard work and refining it took to just get to the meeting and make the sale).
With SOA, the work begins when a development team starts to create a new service—but the work actually starts once that service is successful and the team needs to find efficient ways to support that service across multiple applications and across different projects throughout a company, coordinating updates, providing support, and ensuring consistency and quality over time and over different forms of deployment.
As a result, SOA development isn’t just about development but it’s really about collaboration and lifecycle support. Doing SOA right requires taking the longer view with an understanding to not just how services will be used, but re-used. You also need to understand what it will take to actually support, service and upgrade those services as they fan out across a distributed organization.
