Am I the only person who finds it a bit bizarre that you can buy MS Word, Excel, and Powerpoint templates for justifying an SOA project from businesscase.com? And that you "plug in the numbers" and it creates a business case for why your organization should adopt a Service Oriented Architecture?
"CASEBUILDER™ SOA has everything you need for building an SOA business case and ROI analysis"
http://www.businesscase.com/html/casebuildersoa.html
They say that "A sharp, complete presentation increases the chance of approval as well as enhancing your credibility with decision makers". I'm not sure how credible the presenter would be if the audience finds out that the business case came from businesscase.com. [especially from a page whose title is "Case builder for Real Estate".
My advice to people making the "business case for SOA"? First read some good books on the subject. Here are three I'd recommend: James McGovern et al's "Enterprise Service Oriented Architectures", Jason Bloomberg and Ron Schmelzer's "Service Orient or Be Doomed" [a really good read despite the bombastic title, and the fact that my Queens English education balks at their use of "Orient" not "Orientate"], and Understanding SOA with Web Services by Eric Newcomer and Greg Lomow.
Then, identify low-hanging fruit for service creation. For example, if developers at your organization plough through a lot of client library code to access information like stock inventory or an order delivery status, and write the same functionality in C++, VB, and Java, why not expose these lookups as services which are language-independent and which are high-level so that the developer does not have to concern him/herself with their implementation. This saves development time, and makes it easier to bring new application on-stream quickly. In the security and identity-management area, services can be used to look up user attributes, meaning that developers do not have to bind to directly to directories and look up this information themselves. SAML and WS-Trust are ideal candidates for this [SAML for formatting identity and entitlements tokens, WS-Trust for issuing them and for converting them from one format to another]. I believe that by exposing identity and entitlement lookups as managed services, privacy can be enhanced by keeping the entity and entitlement stores securely managed behind the services, without any direct access.
Of course, the SOA should be managed, otherwise there is the danger of chaos and insecurity. The business case has to build in governance, using a repository such as CentraSite for policies, and runtime enforcement of those policies using XML Gateways [Vordel has VordelSecure and the VS3000 accelerated XML Gateway appliance]. Inside the SOA, security services should be used to overlay security onto the SOA.
So: (a) Education, (b) finding reusable processes that can be converted into high-level services, and (c) the development of a governance framework - those are the three steps I'd recommend for building a business case for SOA.
5:27:31 PM 
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