Strategic IT planning is critical for a successful Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) transformation. To get value from SOA, the effort must be business-focused. Yet many IT shops have historically done a poor job of aligning the IT strategy and portfolio with the business. The Strategic Services Blueprint provides the means to plan and communicate a SOA transformation over time.

From a business perspective, we think of SOA benefits in terms of business process agility or the ability to create business processes from component services. But we also have to think about SOA in terms of IT strategic alignment. Are we focused on building services with the most benefits? Will our new services create flexibility for the most strategic business processes?

Consider that IT has traditionally spent a great deal of time deploying cookie-cutter “ERP-style” projects or supporting monolithic legacy systems. An ERP deployment best practice unfortunately forces a change to the business process itself to support the package out-of-the-box. We resist changes to legacy systems because they are expensive and brittle. But now we are required to think differently. Business processes buried in monolithic systems need to be exposed as services that can be reused by many business processes. With SOA, it is now possible to consider IT business alignment on a processby- process basis automating the activities that support the business strategy in an optimal way.

But to achieve SOA business alignment, we need to plan the transformation over time. We need to create an SOA Roadmap and a Strategic Services Blueprint (the future business services catalog) that will serve as a guide for IT transformation.