http://www.soamag.com The SOA Magazine is a monthly online publication provided by SOA Systems Inc. and Prentice Hall/PearsonPTR and is officially associated with the "Prentice Hall Service-Oriented Computing Series from Thomas Erl." SOA en-us Copyright 2006-2010, SOA Systems Inc. http://www.soamag.com/I40/0610-1.php Measuring the performance of any initiative is imperative for its success. "If you don’t measure it, you won’t improve it" is something that we’ve found to continually be true. In the past few years, the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has become an accepted architectural paradigm, but SOA metrics have not kept up. While, some organizations have had success utilizing SOA, this has typically been in spite of lack of SOA metrics, not because of it. Organizations often struggle in translating technology value of an initiative into business value that the business organization can really understand. Though SOA is supposed to help in technology connecting with the business, there is very minimal prescriptive literature and framework that can guide us in terms of aligning the business and IT... This article looks at utilizing a strategic performance management tool. A "Balanced Scorecard" is a concept that has been around for some time, used for measuring the overall impact of an initiative or department (for example, an "IT Balanced Scorecard"). Extending this concept to SOA makes sense and will be useful for measuring the performance of SOA. Instead of looking at which specific business initiatives SOA can support to drive the revenue numbers, this article looks at SOA itself as a business and should help you to initiate the creation of a Balanced Scorecard for SOA. The perspective of "SOA as a business" is important because it causes the measurement of SOA performance business agnostic to a particular business as opposed to being business specific. This is possible because immaterial of the industry, the basic tenets of SOA remain the same, in that sense it is very similar to a Software Development Lifecycle. SOA http://www.soamag.com/contributors/bio-rlaird.asp#When:29.02.09 http://soamag.com/I26/0223-1.asp The concept of a software factory describes a practical work-product approach to governing an efficient service factory - a software engineering-based approach to defining, developing, testing, deploying, and operating functional services and automated business processes. All services follow a similar lifecycle of analysis, followed by design, development, deployment, and ongoing management. Because the service creation process is repetitive, a production engineering approach to automating software development can be used... SOA http://www.soamag.com/contributors/bio-rlaird.asp#When:29.02.09 http://www.soamag.com/I4/0207-3.asp Globalization is having a tremendous impact on IT. Fueled by technological change and innovation IT is becoming more capable than ever of establishing itself as a true partner to business, a trend that is creating the opportunity for a new breed of IT professional: one that is both technology and business savvy. In this article we discuss the genesis of this accelerating wave of change, how it has been responsible for and relates to the service-oriented architectural model, and how it is contributing to a new field we can call "business technology." (First published in The SOA Magazine Issue IV, February 2007.) SOA http://www.soamag.com/contributors/bio-rlaird.asp#When:29.01.07