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Our user conference (HP Software Universe) was last week in Barcelona.

There were many discussions of SOA, as you would expect. Pawel Maszczyk presented his experience with SOA. The Carphone Warehouse, who has grown 500% over the past five years to have approximately £4B in revenue, has been deploying SOA over the past two and a half years. The business believes that SOA has been a successful initiative because they have seen two business results: a dramatic increase in IT’s ability to respond rapidly to change; and a decrease in cost for IT projects.

One thing that struck me about Pawel’s presentation is that he believes successful SOA adoption can be accelerated significantly. Carphone Warehouse has built their SOA essentially on their own – no extensive involvement of any consulting company or vendor. As they started building and deploying SOA services and composite applications, they addressed issues as they arose. They have now organized all the issues into a seven-part domain model, including projects, building blocks, architecture, business processes, organization, governance, and financial model.

By taking each of the first six domains into consideration at the beginning of a SOA initiative, companies should be able to reduce the challenges that occur during service and application development.

Carphone Warehouse built their domain model as they went through the process of deploying their architecture, essentially putting the model together as they went. HP’s Consulting and Integration practice has an eight-part domain model (business, people, program management, governance, architecture, enabling technologies, operations and management, and supply & demand); the high degree of overlap with Carphone Warehouse is a good thing.

What domain model do you use? How many parts are there?