SOA Management Careers - Orchestration, Service Re-use and Service Contract Roles

At a recent conference, I had a chance to hear DR. Stephane Gagnon of the Inovations Intracubator, Inc. talk about "Integrating SOA, With Enterpise IT".  A very energetic speaker he gave an excellent talk on putting SOA into perspective of within the overall Enterprise Architecture.  He proposes a new model called SOA7 for the Service-Oriented Development of Applications (SODA).  His web site should be coming soon SOA7.

What I found interesting in his presenation was his views on SOA Management and how SOA will create other opportunities as far as new roles and responsibilities and the management of SOA Services. 

He believes new roles will need to be created:

1) Business Process Orchestration Role - this is the most obvious talked about new role is for Business Process Orchestration Role, whereby this person takes services and creates new services that support business processes within or between organizations.

2) Service Reuse Role - SOA's ROI is fundamentally based on the re-use of services and associated savings of not having to build new software.  However who is going to manage this re-use?  Without the monitoring of this metric, services will get built and economies will never be capitalized on.  This person is going to have to monitor and control the development and reuse of services in order to re-coup investment in services.

3) Service Contract Management Role - The primary SOA use case model includes the use contracts between a service provide and service consumer.  While you may think this is trivial, wait until you try to share services between lines of business within your enterprise or even worse between enterprises.  Many organizations say the "politics of shared services" is more complicated than the technology itself.  Questions must be answered as to who owns the service, who maintains it, how do you manage these services, and all contract and quality of services related to those services.

Another perspective on these roles is being put forth in the industry by a variety of people who believe that "Product Management Principles" should be applied to SOA.  In this view the services become products that are managed throughout their lifecycle.  In a recent article in Infoworld by David L. Margulius he expands on this view: see Article - A Product Management Approach to SOA. 

I am sure there may be additional roles required with the implementation of SOA, and if you are looking to contribute to the SOA deployment within your organization, you can either resist it or position yourself for one of these new emerging SOA roles.

I will have more on Stephane's presentation and SOA7 in an upcoming blog.

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Gary E. Smith
SOA Project Manager