SOA, or Service-Oriented Architecture is not a couple of Web Services!
For several times I see products being sold with a label SOA, or people on LinkedIn saying about their experience with SOA, but when you question about it, the answer usually is the same: the product implement some web services, or the person knows how to develop web services. That drives me crazy!
Other people think they implement SOA just because they have web services implemented, orchestrated by a ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) tool or a BPM (business process management) tool. It's better then just talk about web services, but still misses a big context.
Ok, SOA is somehow tied to the service concept. But it's in a bigger scenario, and I'm not just only talking about service orchestration, I'm talking about a top-down approach in the whole organization, a SOA Governance.
In 2009 I had to deal with a SOA Governance project, to define a SOA Center of Excellence. At that time, I didn't have a clear picture of SOA, just some ideas and concepts. I also couldn't find any good reference, or someone that could help me to define it. The best approach, where I based my proposal came from The Open Group. At that time, they just had a work-in-progress document about SOA Governance, based on COBIT and ITIL methodologies.
Basically, the idea was to apply SOA Governance methodology along with Project Management and Development methodologies together. And that's the big picture, the recipe to structure SOA. Of course, the amount of details on each methodology is really impressive, and all related to each other. Also, it depends on the company's adoptions - you can't just throw everything the company uses to implement everything with the new methodologies. You have to adapt, and have a detailed plan to make it possible to be done.
You should try it. Ask anyone about SOA. You'll find lots of "experts" that can talk for hours about... web services!
