Sometime back I was made part of a SOA CoE (Center of Excellence) and we were tasked to take the SOA program for the organization forward. I had recently read the book EA as Strategy and Leveraging the new Infrastructure and I was trying to understand how these concepts play in SOA. I ran into this Blog which made an excellent point how in certain organizations certain initiatives are successful but in some they mean different things.
I started to think about how can I frame this effectively so that it doesn't give a narrow meaning to the program but has widespread implications to the organization. Then almost by accident I ran into Balanced Score Card(BSC). The book by Kaplan and Norton gives a great introduction. The framework nicely framed up the various tenets in the enterprise and how they play into satisfying the ultimate common goal for commerical organizations i.e. "Show me the money". Organizations use BSC to prioritize and align the various initiatives in the organization to the common goal.
Balanced Score Card This led me to think, I were to think of the CoE as a business then it would have similar characteristics, granted it would be business agnostic mostly but it would effectively help me in understanding what value can I drive out of SOA. It led me to the construction of my first BSC for SOA given below
SOA Balanced Score Card