SOA Assessment and Roadmap

Recognizing the challenges customers face in moving to a truly service-oriented architecture, Crescent has developed an SOA Readiness Assessment service offering that leverages our years of experience in delivering enabling technology solutions that meet the unique needs of each customer. Crescent’s SOA Readiness Assessment provides customers with an analysis of their organization’s readiness to move to a service-oriented architecture that is consistent with Crescent SOA recommendations, a set of best practices specifically developed to complement this service offering. This assessment service is performed by experienced Crescent architects and consultants over a 3-9 week period, and involves four major activities:

• Discovery - Determine existing business and technology strategies, methodologies, processes, infrastructure, and enterprise application integration (EAI) and business-to-business (B2B) architectures through interviews and document collection.
• Analysis - Compare existing state evidence to Crescent SOA guidelines to determine best practices and gaps.
• Working Sessions - Crescent architects and consultants will conduct multiple 1-2 day architecture working sessions with key customer stakeholders to identify SOA opportunities and challenges, explain findings, and validate tactical and strategic recommendations formulated during the SOA Readiness Assessment.
• Findings - Deliver SOA Readiness Assessment results in the form of a written report and/or onsite presentation to key customer stakeholders. The SOA Readiness Assessment will include both tactical and strategic recommendations for migration to a service-oriented architecture.

The key deliverable of the SOA Readiness Assessment service is a report that identifies the current state and the best practices within the organization being evaluated, identifies major concerns or gaps, and provides recommendations and a high-level SOA roadmap that considers the unique goals and challenges of the customer organization. This report is presented in a document format as well as a formal presentation to the customer to enable dialogue and to discuss a plan for executing on the SOA roadmap. Customers engaging Crescent for an SOA Readiness Assessment will benefit by:

• Gaining an understanding of their relative readiness for moving to SOA
• Identifying best practices within their organization to leverage further when moving to SOA
• Identifying critical concerns that must be addressed in the move to SOA
• Gaining an in-depth understanding of Crescent SOA guidelines and recommendations from experienced Crescent Client Services architects and consultants

Crescent’s SOA Readiness Assessment service is most valuable when delivered in concert with other Crescent SOA services including an Architecture Workshop for SOA and consulting/architecture services.