The first step towards SOA

Some leading SOA guidelines talks about understanding your business, processes and domains in advance of implementing any supporting tools. Understanding one's business is good but a SOA project probably have no use of that information initially. Starting with the big scope is often why those projects never see the day lights.

SOA implementations does not need to know about implementation details, such of business processes, data services, etc. This type of information is related to projects (such as BPM implementations) enabled by a SOA. The first step would instead be to build the foundation for your SOA (i.e. service governance tools). While many analysts and consultants recommend their clients not to go with a product-first-approach, that is definitely my number one recommendation.

The next step would be to make use of the SOA. The first project would preferably be one that leverage on all good things with SOA, but doesn't interfere with the day-to-day operational work. BPM implementations are the most obvious one in terms of making use of service governance. BPM is a top-down approach that will give you the services needed from a business process perspective. When you have defined your processes, a couple of service will be implemented as a result.

The third step would be to roll out a large scale BPM project and make your applications SOA-ready.