Presentation
EA-SOA-SOLA: The missing link

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is increasingly acknowledged as the best way to maximize existing IT investment while planning for future growth. As a discipline, Enterprise Architecture is tasked to ensure Business-IT alignment through architectural oversight and guidance. It provides the enterprise with a 4-view model (Business, Information, Application and Technical architectures) to analyse and determine the right set of IT related decisions to enable and support business strategy.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) as an architectural strategy dictates the separation of consumption of business functionality from the provision of business functionality through well-formed service contracts. This architectural strategy can be applied not only at the enterprise level but also at a more fine-grained Solution Architecture (SOLA) level.

SOA principles introduce the concept of a new first order entity - Service into the mix of things, both at the Enterprise level and the Solution level. SOA also introduces the necessity to develop services independently of solutions - albeit solutions will drive the need for services.

So, how do these elements drive and impact the nature of application development today? It is critical that we identify services in a top-down approach - this allows us to use a modified EA framework to identify the right set of services that the enterprise needs. This activity then fuels the development of the identified services either in advance of demand or driven by projects. Therefore, it is possible to define traceability from the Enterprise Architecture through to the development of solutions and services.

This presentation elaborates the definitive links between EA artefacts and SOA artefacts as well as how service development impacts EA and SOLA development.

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