Community Developed SOA Recommendations

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a maturing approach to enterprise-wide modular component development. The CDC does not currently have an agency-wide authority responsible for establishing, reporting and measuring compliance to SOA standards and best practices. In absence of such an authority, the CDC Enterprise Architecture Community of Practice (EA CoP) formed a special interest group of SOA architects and developers who developed a series of recommendation documents. These documents provide a voluntary approach to sharing SOA related standards and best practices with stewards, project managers, architects and developers seeking to use SOA to deliver critical public health services. This presentation describes the four recommendations developed by the community as well as the process followed in collaboratively developing the recommendations.

 

Although developed by the CDC community, these recommendations are useful for any public health organization seeking to improve the performance of their informatics infrastructure. The community developed a series service management life cycle recommendations, service interoperability recommendations, service description recommendations and service governance recommendations.

 

The service management life cycle recommendations document describes an approach to planning, designing, implementing, delivering and measuring services within an enterprise. This recommendation defines the groups within an organization that participate and benefit from SOA.

 

The service interoperability recommendations describe optimal standards and practices around security, interface standards, metadata and documentation that allow services developed by disparate organizations to interoperate.

 

The service description recommendations describe useful metadata for services that allows other organizations to discover and use services.

 

Finally, the governance recommendations describe a process for organizations to internally plan and measure adherence to gain maximum benefit from SOA.

 These four recommendation documents provide a good basis for organizations to improve their SOA until such a time as an authority is established to formally encourage SOA-related standards and practices.