The idea that a good enterprise architecture (EA) is a key enabler for an effective adoption of aservice-oriented architecture (SOA) has been raised by many years (see the Ibrahim and Longcitation in Resources), and many customers have paid for the absence of an EA "due diligence" atthe price of project failure or half-failure. The architecture big picture, the end-to-end link betweenbusiness processes and IT services, and the day-to-day governance mechanism that come withan established enterprise architecture are all essential elements for an SOA that keeps its promiseof a technology capable of transforming the business and the enterprise.
Now, I can hear your mind buzzing, thinking something like, "I must have opened the wrong article.This was supposed to be about cloud, not SOA."
The fact is that, whether we are discussing cloud or SOA, we are dealing with services.
Saying "services" means that we willingly accept structuring our IT with a granularity that isprobably sub-optimal for the management of the specific problem at hand, and we are also willingto accept to over-engineer some of its components to support an increased level of flexibilityrearrange business operations. (Think about standardizing interfaces, for example. It doesn’thappen for free, and it pays back only when you are actually reusing the function.) This level offlexibility is, in itself, only a means to achieve flexible business processes. Those, in turn, havemeaningful economic returns only if they support flexible, informed business strategies.