NCC Members have free access to this Guideline on the Principia website.

For many years, IT developers and system users have been searching for effective and efficient means of integrating their systems. Very often this results in a tangle of specially crafted interfaces and connectors. There are issues with data format definition, operations timing and synchronisation and more subtle problems with mismatches in semantic meaning. All this has made the provision of IT application support for rapidly evolving business processes both difficult and expensive.

A Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) offers a clean and elegant solution to these issues. Based on standards such as XML, SOAP and the Web Services stack, an SOA provides a means of achieving the necessary agility and flexibility to support rapidly evolving business processes and changing business objectives and goals.

In these Guidelines, we review the business benefits offered by the SOA approach and explore its architectural foundations. Finally, providing ten key issues to be considered and resolved in designing, implementing and operating a Service-Oriented Architecture.

These Guidelines are purposely brief and include only the minimum of theoretical and technical descriptions - this forms part of a major piece of work to develop Best Practice in the area of Service-Oriented Architecture which will be available at the end of 2005. The aim is for IT management to access the essentials quickly, be able to ask the right questions of the technicians and, starting from a conventional IT platform, to formulate a strategy to move towards a Service-Oriented Architecture over time.

Acocrdingly each section of these Guidelines includes a set of suggested questions to ask and a set of recommended actions to take SOA forward to fruition.