Reader question: We have opted for an SOA strategy for application development, but I don't quite understand what is the relationship between SOA and enterprise architecture?

Brian Burke, research vice president at Gartner, says:

The decision to move to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy must be made within the context of the organisation, not a project or a development team. So, when you "opted for an SOA strategy for application development," you (hopefully) had already made an enterprise architecture decision. If the decision to move to an SOA was made within the narrow context of a project or development approach, there is a high probability of failure. Besides the decision to move to an SOA approach, there are a number of other intersection points between SOA and EA to consider.

Typically, the selection of technologies to support SOA is an enterprise architecture decision. There are many participants in technology selection decisions, including representatives from application development, security, operations and other groups, but enterprise architects will drive technology selection decisions.

Enterprise architects also play a role in determining which services to develop and the development priorities. Enterprise architects typically have a good understanding of the broad application landscape and are well positioned to identify services with the greatest potential for reuse. Enterprise architects (particularly business architects) also know which business processes are highly volatile and can focus SOA efforts to support those processes that must be rapidly reconfigured as business processes change. Enterprise architects (particularly information architects) also have a good understanding of the data that is most commonly used and shared across the organisations. Information architects are well positioned to identify data-centric types of services, which provide consistent access to shared data.

It is a common mistake for organisations to believe that the move to an SOA development approach is purely a development decision. The move to an SOA approach has a broad impact on many areas of the business and IT. Gartner recommends that organisations create an integration competency centre (ICC) as a forum for decision making to support the migration to an SOA approach. Enterprise architects play a key role in the ICC, providing information on the business vision and strategy, guiding principles, future state models and roadmaps, technology standards, and executive sponsorship. 

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