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Migration to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) has become a key strategy for a growing number of organizations. Experts say that one of the main benefits of SOA for early adopters has been a significant reduction in the time and expense needed to deliver new applications and revamp existing ones to support changing business processes.

Given that a move to SOA represents a major shift for many organizations, developing some level of governance and best practices are likely to be a key to achieving success. One of the ways organizations can establish central control and harness best practices is to create a SOA “center of excellence.”

The breadth of responsibilities assigned to the center of excellence will vary depending on how extensively an organization wants to evolve to a service-oriented environment. But some of the functions of the center could include helping to select standards and products; planning and designing a new SOA environment; training; promoting SOA within the organization; and educating employees about a services-based environment and what it means to them.

“A center of excellence is very important. You really can't implement SOA in a vacuum,” says Judith Hurwitz, president of consulting and research firm Hurwitz & Associates. “ It is important that organizations bring together a team that represents the IT and the business organization.”

Hurwitz says SOA is as much a business strategy as it is a technology strategy. “For example, once an organization starts planning to create business services that will be used across business units, these services have to be designed to meet corporate policy,” she says. “The center of excellence can have oversight on governance and best practices. Most successful SOA implementations [include] a center of excellence as part of a leadership and oversight plan.

Companies that have established a SOA center of excellence “benefit by having a centralized team that represents best practices in development and business strategy,” Hurwitz says. “These centers will often bring in expertise to help provide the skills and insight to this team.” The team then can provide leadership to different departments, subsidiaries and business partners.

Centers of excellence can help organizations reap the maximum gains from a SOA deployment, says Ian Finley, research director at AMR Research. One of these is the r euse of services across multiple applications to help reduce the cost and time required to deliver new capabilities to users.

The SOA center of excellence “is often the primary team responsible for ensuring that the services which are created are designed in such a way that they are suited to reuse and ensuring that existing services are reused,” Finley says. While reuse doesn't require a center of excellence, in cases where one exists, its members “are often the key people needed to ensure [that] service reuse happens,” he says.

Another common benefit is business agility. To achieve greater agility through SOA, companies need to proactively design their architecture to support potential future business needs, Finley says. Having the center own that responsibility enables companies to build the best SOA possible for their needs, he says.

Setting up a center of excellence enables organizations to start with a small number of SOA practitioners, demonstrate success with the architecture and expand adoption from there, Finley says. “It also helps companies create or enhance a technical career-growth path and retain its best IT people,” he says. “This is similar to the rise of the enterprise architecture groups, and often the two are one and the same.”

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