4.2: Architecture
Implementing a Service Oriented Architecture Other Information:
Enterprise architecture has evolved as a discipline to take a view across programs and organizations – both horizontally and
vertically, and is maturing rapidly in most federal government organizations. As a result, federal agencies have new insight
into value chain inefficiencies and undesirable redundancies. At the same time, the Federal Enterprise Architecture is enabling
government-wide consolidation and improvements, catalogued each year in the Federal Transformation Framework. The result is
a need to interoperate and share information on a broader scope at every level of the Federal Government. To achieve the benefits
of service orientation, they must be purposefully designed into the enterprise target architecture. Depending on the maturity
of the organization the enterprise architecture may still be evolving, but architectures at the business unit or line of business
level may be in place and more mature. Regardless, it is important to extract a working service portfolio from the target
architecture(s) in order to link services effectively to business requirements. Ultimately, the most effective target service
portfolio plan will be derived from enterprise business models that are developed based on real business activities. The service
portfolio plan identifies the enduring collection of services required to support the automation of your business/mission
and, through this automation, ultimately improve business outcomes. Once established, this enterprise service portfolio plan
becomes the lynch pin of your SOA. The target service portfolio plan will: • Decouple business operations from the underlying
current technology architecture. • Provide a holistic vision that can serve as the common context for all proposed IT solutions.
• Enable restructuring of your IT portfolio to include both solutions and services. • Enable improved procurement practices
and governance of outsourced IT capabilities. • Drive the restructuring of your legacy portfolio to reduce the cost and risk
associated with strategic undertakings such as outsourcing. Recommendations for Service Oriented Architecture: • Develop,
in collaboration with business units and IT, business models that help to align the EA with business objectives. • Develop
an EA Target Architecture that is service based and focused on business priorities. • Based on the service-based Target Architecture,
develop investment portfolios that are founded on services and solutions focused on fulfilling key business objectives. •
Establish or adopt reference architectures and reference implementations that can be used by project implementation teams
to jump start their SOA efforts. • Use the EA artifacts and the database of information developed during the EA process to
mitigate the compliance burden placed on projects. • Assess all legacy assets in terms of their relationship to Target Architecture
objectives, and factor this analysis into decisions for how to provision each service.
Objective(s):
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