What are the practical challenges of reusing services? Well, if you’ve tried to deploy SOA, the following questions might sound familiar.

To reuse a service, you need to know it exists. So, how do you even find a service? Then, how can you know whether it's designed to do what you need? And the big one: how can you trust that the service will deliver what's promised? Since you’re the one on the line to deliver your application, it’s hard to trust someone that you’ve never met.

Once the service is in production, how can you be sure that it is available and performing when you need it? Since it isn’t under your control, isn’t it difficult to commit to using it?

And that’s just the start. Certainly you need to be sure that whenever it gets changed, you are aware of the change when you need to be. And it must continue to work when there is a totally internal change. How do you get an enhancement request in to the provider? How do you report a bug? How do you prioritize a new service to be created?

Now, if you’re the person responsible for SOA overall at your org, don’t forget the people portion of the equation. How do you motivate people to reuse services rather than building new ones? Is there a best way to train the different players involved in SOA? Who’s responsible for saying that a service is ready to go into production? What organization structures should you use?

Our customers have told us that these are the challenges that they face as soon as they get a few services under their belts – as soon as they get some services that they really care about. And once they begin to address these challenges, they really start seeing the business benefits that SOA is supposed to provide.

And that is what it all comes down to – getting the business results. SOA isn’t meant to be technology for its own sake. It really can make a difference to the company’s bottom line – and to your paycheck. But only if you address these challenges – getting SOA to be successful in the ongoing operations of your IT. And that’s why we call this Operationalizing SOA.