The CIO responded to the results of the SOA Maturity Assessment by creating an enterprise architect team whose responsibility was to ensure that business needs were clearly reflected in all future IT development efforts, and that the underlying infrastructure was able to scale to meet business demands. The team was also responsible for rationalizing existing systems and services and for reducing or removing redundancy.
One of the first actions for the architecture team was to create a reference architecture that specified a blueprint for all IT systems within Weir & Bell Telecom. The reference architecture supported IT agility by putting SOA at the heart of system development. This would allow the IT department to keep pace with the demands of the business moving forward and facilitate the introduction of new sales channels as identified in the business strategy for growth.
The enterprise architecture team also set out clear objectives for SOA Governance. Moreover, it was concluded that, in order to achieve these objectives, appropriate tooling would be required to support the desired processes and responsibilities. While the targeted objectives of the framework were known (as it can be appreciated from the following diagram), the tools needed to support these objectives was yet to be determined. Invitations to tender were consequently sent out to the main software vendors and a selection process was undertaken to determine which could provide the infrastructure required to underpin the governance effort.
A key driver for product selection was support for design-time governance, encompassing service discovery, and cataloging for reuse, dependency management, service lifecycle, and support for the enforcement of policies and standards. The product was also required to support effective runtime governance with support for a common UDDI registry, runtime policy enforcement (including security), exception handling, service deployment, and system monitoring.
After an exhaustive product selection exercise, the Oracle SOA Governance Solution was chosen as the preferred software toolset to support the implementation of SOA Governance at Weir & Bell Telecom.
As the preceding diagram suggests, the decision was made mainly for two reasons. Firstly, the product offering from Oracle was extremely strong at supporting design-time and runtime Governance, and therefore was highly aligned with the team's objectives for its governance effort. Secondly, as Oracle already had a considerable footprint in the technology landscape at Weir & Bell telecom, it was concluded that implementing the Oracle SOA Governance Solution would have considerable benefits as these products were certified to integrate with other Oracle Fusion Middleware products already implemented in the company, such as the Oracle SOA Suite 11g.