Management of the service-oriented-architecture life cycle

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) development and deployment generally builds on a service view of the world in which a set of services are assembled and reused to quickly adapt to new business needs. This flexibility is seen by many IT organizations as the core value of SOA and has been driving some deep transformations in the way software is being built. Although SOA technology addresses many of the traditional problems of integrating disparate business processes and applications, deploying service-based applications introduces new aspects of the information technology (IT) environment that must be managed. These new aspects include developing and testing applications composed of operational services, deploying and provisioning distributed service-based applications across organizational boundaries in a secure, reliable, and repeatable manner, and tracking the business impact of services on the business processes that those services support. This paper describes the management capabilities needed to ensure that an SOA fulfills its promise of increasing integration and improving business adaptability.