"Gaining a level of understanding of SOA is important as SOA is a concept to most people,"  noted Sean Valcamp, Information Technology Director and Enterprise Architect for Avnet Inc, at the 15th International SOA World Conference & Expo 2009 East, which opened Monday in New York City. He discussed how in today's business world, measuring your success is a must especially in our current economic climate. It's something we do as individuals, teams, and companies.

But, with the drive to advance SOA, tying Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to your SOA strategy can get lost in the complexity and rush to move your projects forward. When starting a project, you need to look at existing cultures and how they are doings things, and see what SOA will provide. You also need to measure things that will allow you to have a consistent comparison.

Strategy and maturity are two important components of SOA. With strategy, you need to look at the ID components that are valid to your customer; look at the structure; and look at the business and customer alignment.

Maturity links back to strategy, Valcamp said. You need to look at IT capital and expenses, at how things are done and also look at SOA capacity.

He also discussed how Avnet used a performance-driven approach to building consensus among corporate executives to gain approval and then among key stakeholders to advance adoption and build SOA momentum from one project to the next.